Thanks for the tips, Josh. I look forward to your review.
I exited FB years ago and got off Twitter a month ago.
I do like interacting with people who share my interests — that’s why I like Art of Memory so much. Here, I feel, it’s more like having a conversation without angry vitriol from social sites. I learn things here that (hopefully) improve my cognition. Kudos, man.
Related:
I saw this app today. I haven’t tried it, but it looks interesting:
This is great. I went ahead and set my dumb phone interface up. Thanks for sharing. 
Even without fixing a time-limit, just taking note of how much time you spend on something is eye opening. For example there is in NativShark an option to track the “native content” you consume and for how many minutes. So if I binged watched a serie and have to note that I watched 20 episodes in two days, which makes about 8 hours, it gives me sort of a shock and makes me say “okay I’ll take a break from that”. Because it crossed the line form “useful practice” to “mindless consuming”: there is not way I was truly attentive to vocab during that 8 hours, nobody can really have focused attention for so long.
Also sometimes the time-limit (or any other limits) are temporary, for the period necessary to break a habit. For example, about a year ago, I found myself obessively checking whatsapp to see if people had read my messages (the check mark becomes blue). Turning off that option for a while sort of broke the addiction for me (not that I’m not still using whatsapp a lot, but at least I’m not going through all conversations, to see if people have read my messages).
This video might interest people who are concerned about mobile phone addiction.
@Josh, I’m curious, why’d you switch back to Thunderbird from Mutt?
(I searched “mutt” because I just got Neomutt up and running so I don’t have to deal with the gui-hog known as Gmail’s website)
It has been a while and I don’t remember why I stopped. Maybe the mutt config broke when I got a MacBook, and I didn’t have time to fix it.
It’s interesting that this started showing up in the 2010s, during the rise of smartphone use. 
Though there has been a demonstrably steep decline in cognitive skills since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the educational disruption it presented, these trends have been in evidence since at least the mid-2010s, suggesting that whatever is going on runs much deeper and has lasted far longer than the pandemic.
Obviously, there’s no single answer as to why people seem to be struggling with cognitive skills, but one key indicator is the sharp decline in reading and the world’s changing relationship to the way we consume information and media. In 2022, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 37.6 percent of Americans said they’d read a novel or short story in the year prior — a share down from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.
Some commentary on it from Ted Gioia’s newsletter. (Great newsletter, by the way.)
I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”
But that’s just sophistry and spin.
Microsoft researchers recently published a study showing that excessive use of new tech leads to a “deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
Theses innovations “deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared.”
Facebook did similar research, with similarly frightening results—and they worked hard to bury the results. We weren’t supposed to see the charts below. But a brave whistleblower took photos and leaked them to the Wall Street Journal .
This article is going around at the moment. It mentions the Ted Gioia article above, so I’ll add it here. Leave a comment below if anyone has thoughts on the author’s opinions.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels… I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.
Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought.
I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.
It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun.
Related discussion: Are social media apps killing productivity?
i’ve got a couple!
old man yells at cloud, whatever. (which he did anticipate in the intro, to give him credit) how many fifty-something americans could analyze the themes of a novel or whatever at the rate this guy is holding 19-year-olds to? every generation thinks the next one is a bunch of lazy losers. if they’re turning in work that’s either obviously AI or complete trash, fail them! help them improve! that’s your job! if you can’t teach under these circumstances then it’s your fault, not tiktok (and i do see a lot of people in the comments providing a slight dose of reality along these lines.) Speaking for myself, I didn’t cheat in college at any point, but i definitely cut a lot of corners where i could get away with it and missed more than two weeks of many, many classes. the professors that wanted me to learn still made it happen (turns out that’s their job!) When i DID attend class, i often wasn’t paying attention because i was thinking about Starcraft build orders, not watching Tate McRae videos or whatever. But it’s the same thing. bad students aren’t new. (also: a few years after squeaking out of my public school with a 2.X GPA, i started appearing on–and winning–game shows. maybe i learned something, gasp, outside the classroom)
There is something to be said for how easy it is to do nothing nowadays. You can just scroll. for hours. in one ear and out the other. phones/tech/whatever can be super addicting. that’s a different concern less related to the article, but for the thread itself i think it’s important. at least in the 90s you had to be on meth or something to just have a weekend disappear, but today you could absolutely lose it to tiktok or youtube shorts or something. But at the same time, everyone knows that can happen, and after you spend an hour being like “ugh… i just… wasted an entire day?” then it’s not a tiktok problem anymore. it’s a personal choice to do it again (over and over) or not. just as it is to wear your seatbelt or not drink or smoke weed or whatever.
the only other real comment i have is that this is a lot of weird stuff for a lightly pseudonymous university professor to say about his current students and if i were his boss i’d probably tell him not to say these things, and if i were one of the students i’d probably be annoyed by it! but that’s kind of beside the point.
As somebody with teachers in the family I can tell you no, you can’t just fail the students (especially if you should actually fail almost everybody). You have to deal with the parents who are going to complain (and dealing with the parents are the hardest part of being a teacher).
Most children/teens aren’t interested in literature, that’s nothing new. And to be honest I’m not sure it’s the most useful thing to study for them at this point.
What’s new is that they can’t put away their phone because their brain chemistry is messed up. You’re basically trying to teach addicts in withdrawal… Needless to say they’re not actually physically able to concentrate, regardless if the lesson is interesting or not.
It’s easier to teach the young people who are in prison, because they’re not allowed phones and so are actually interested in engaging with you.
Honestly I think encouraging people to go to college/university directly after high school is a waste (especially if they’re unlucky to live in a country when they’re going to be heavily in debt after it). At that age they don’t have the maturity (physically in the brain) and the life experience to really make the most of it.
In retrospect, my teachers in high school did tons of things right, but I didn’t appreciate it, in a sense I wasted a lot of ressources.
My best decision was to work and travel a bit after high school and beginning university only two years later, in a practical program with students of different ages and situations. When you have a classroom with people with different life experience it’s so much more interesting and effective.
You’re not going to goof off for three hours in the library instead of studying, because when you have in your group people who need to go back home to cook dinner for their family, they don’t stand for it. So you do what you need to and your evenings are truly free instead of having to do homework and such.
I dunno. While I sympathize somewhat with the author’s opinion, I don’t think it’s all phones. A lot of it is school curricula. I have a kid in elementary school right now - she’s in 4th grade. Do you know how many books they’ve been assigned to read in their English class this year? Zero. Yup, that’s right. There’s not a single assigned book in that entire English class. They read short excerpts and watch videos. Luckily, my kid is the kind of kid who loves to read and does read whole novels for fun (she is currently writing a novel), so I’m not terribly worried here, but what about the other kids?
Do you know what their social science class is like? You’d think that a 4th grade class covers history and geography. You know how much actual substantive content there is in either one of these subjects? Approximately zero. They did have a couple of units on some historical topics, but mostly they’re learning mindless “critical thinking” techniques without learning any subject matter to critically think about. I’m having to supplement this class with a homeschool history curriculum just so that the poor thing learns something substantive.
So if someone goes through 12 years of absolutely nothing of any interest or value being taught in school, how can anyone expect them to suddenly be able to read Dostoevsky and think deeply about what they read? I mean, do they even know the historical context here? Can they find Russia on a map? Have they read any other Russian literature? Do they know the different schools of thought in 19th century Russia and what motivated them and what they thought about what was going on? I mean, if you’ve only ever read easy and familiar stuff, what will you do when you suddenly have to read a complex and involved foreign book with very unfamiliar cultural references and unfamiliar names?
@meepster , I think you were probably the impetus that excited the reading instinct in your kid. My parents had none. I didn’t have experience like @Hari-P said you need, and I had plenty of resources that I ignored. I learned some Russian in high school, I learned Czech later, and I started to know people. I recently read Anna Karenina to immerse myself in that era. Thoughtful, caring, experience driven.
Phones are a symptom and the cause is in my opinion how we rely on ourselves more than make relationships to strengthen us or take us to new places. Keep doing what you do to encourage people, especially your family. I like it .
That’s worrying. There was a recent discussion about that topic here too: Are young people losing the ability to read books?
Edit: I reposted this comment to fix an error (originally posted yesterday).
People who want to get offline might be interested in this:
Too much phone for me in the last three months.
It’s a bit ironic that the only way that this Offline Club can reach out is by going online, no?