Comment by eesmith
20 days ago
The first author's commentary at https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj-2024-082569.full is easier to read than the paper you linked to.
In it she suggests that rather than thinking of a smart phone ban like a smoking ban,
> A more constructive analogy than smoking might be driving cars. In response to increasing injuries and deaths from car crashes, rather than banning cars, society built an ecosystem of product safety regulations for companies (seatbelts, airbags) and consumers (vehicle safety tests, penalties), public infrastructure (traffic lights), and education (licences) to support safer use. Comparative efforts in product safety and education are needed to supplement debates about smartphone and social media bans and to balance the positive and indispensable role of digital technologies against their potential harms.
It's an intriguing analogy because we know well how dangerous cars are to health and the environment, we know there are people who don't want to drive but are forced to because there are no alternatives, and we know how much many drivers oppose support for bike lanes, mass transit, and other alternatives.
And we know the history of how the UK over her entire life has transformed to be more and more car dependent.
If we embrace that analogy, then we need to support alternatives to being digital, with the right to an offline life.
I don't know what System A and System B are, a DDG search for "System A {thinking,reasoning}" finds nothing useful, and the paper says nothing about it nor about comparing dopamine levels.
I apologize for the "System A/B" confusion, I was of course trying to reference the "System 1/2" paradigm from Daniel Kahneman's well known book "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
Addictive apps are algorithmically tuned to maximize user screen time so my (unproven) hypothesis is that tend to promote content that minimizes deep System 2 thinking, which is well known to tire the brain and deplete its energy storage. Educational content - if it's any good - is all about training deep thinking.
Thank you. I had not heard of it before.
Has it been validated? I cannot find citations which test and verify the applicability of that idea.
I ask because there's a long history (left-brain/right-brain, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, learning style theory, power pose, etc) where intriguing ideas which makes some intuitive sense end up being not so clear cut.
At its core, I think it's basically just a self-evident metaphor of how human cognition works that does not need any validation.
For example it's very clear that when you see a square you can instantly tell what shape it is without reasoning about the number and length of the sides, angles etc.; another System 1 example would be driving, you can do it for hours without even thinking through your physical actions, I need to press this pedal, shift into this gear, etc. the car basically becomes an extension of your body.
Conversely, when asked to mentally multiply 175 and 12 the answer does not similarly jump out in the head of most people, and you need to run an algorithm to get the answer, and the process of doing that is frustrating and tiresome if you don't have the exercise; conversely, with enough exercise, the answer might jump out, or your brain might begin to see patterns and shortcuts like 175 = 350/2 and 12 = 10+2 etc. This is what education forces, this continuous exercise that leads to higher cognitive function.
I don't think you could dispute the paradigm in this vague and self-evident form, but surely the exact details of how System 1 does its pattern matching and how System 2 rationally trains it to recognize future patterns are up for debate. Some of the examples and arguments Kahneman gives are dated and have been discredited or questioned in the great psychology replication crisis.
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