I read to my two kids every day until they were 13-14 years old. They loved books. Every car ride was an opportunity to listen to an audiobook. The kids loved to write and make arts and crafts as well.
During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.
After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.
When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.
Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.
If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.
Your comment is spot on. The support of a teacher and a group are essential to go along with the practice. They are called The Three Jewels for a reason.
Reviewing code becomes more arduous. Not only are the pull requests more bloated, the developer who pushed them doesn't always understand the implications of their changes. It's harder to maintain and track down bugs. I spend way too much time explaining AI generated code to the developer who "wrote" it.
If you block Google, as much of it as possible anyway, on your firewall, does the device work/install? I tried /e/ and Lineage about a year ago, but neither of them worked when Google was blocked completely. The only one that made no requests to Google was Graphene.
Add Akamai to that list of ASNs and you cover everything. I did that experiment a couple of years ago and my Apple devices went unresponsive unless I disconnected them from the Internet entirely.
The rabbit hole goes as far as locking yourself out of many government services. If you’re a Canadian, it means not being able to travel without submitting to corporate privacy policies and ToS (ArriveCan apps/website).
That would be a hard one. A book of appetizers without a main course. I read it when I was an undergrad wanting to get a broad sense of different areas in Math I could pursue.
If I had to pick one math book it would have to be a classic with some depth to it: Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s Principia, or Gauss’ Disquisitiones.
Last time I used macOS, 2-3 years ago, it was in constant communication with Akamai servers. Blocking some of those hosts to prevent it from doing so would render the system unresponsive when trying to launch an application.
Note: this anecdote may no longer be current. I’m not sure what changes Apple might have made since I tested this.
> including switching away from polyester clothing to cotton, linen and wool where possible.
I’ve been going through the same thing lately. My daughter had offered to show me how to naturally dye and sew my own clothes if I get the undyed fabric. I’m eager to take her up on that.
Clothing is mostly plastic fibre nowadays. Upholstery fibres too. Walls are painted with acrylic paint. Flooring is often made of various plastics. I assume the dust in our homes that we breathe in contains relatively a lot of plastic. Containers for food are almost entirely plastic.
I’m interested in these sorts of studies on the topic.
Bradbury covered the spectrum of from literal book burning to idea burning through his characters. In my opinion it's through Faber he hit the nail on the head. It's not just books, but the quality and "texture" of the information, having time to reflect and contemplate it (leisure), and having the ability and willingness to act upon it.
I’ve been pro-nuclear for the past 20+ years and have echoed the same arguments and sentiments expressed here. However, I’ve started to waver.
Is it naive idealism to expect a future where nuclear technology won’t be weaponized? We have to maintain global peace for thousands of years without a large-scale war. It’s incredibly unlikely given that scale of time that global peace will be continuously maintained.
It’s not just trust in media (or government). It’s most societal institutions that have lost trust. I’d argue even trusting one’s own neighbours is probably at an all-time low.
Trust should be something we think about in our interactions and how we can work to improve it.
The warning from Huxley is regarding what happens when the choice of child rearing (and bearing) are removed by both government and social pressures. He explores this to the extreme but many aspects of his thought experiment in Brave New World exist today.
More and more of child rearing is controlled by state institutions: child care, preschool, grade school, trade school, university, sports/activities, work, etc. Some are mandatory and some people are left with no other choice, e.g. both parents have to work to make ends meet, extended families live farther apart. A mother or father working as homemakers and child rearers are negatively viewed and social pressure mounts against one who chooses to do so (speaking from experience).
During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.
After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.
When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.
Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.
If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.