In Scandinavia in particular, there’s a tendency of pescatarians to refer to themselves as vegetarian for social convenience, but that hasn’t changed the definition of “vegetarian”.
You’re an intelligent mammal, your biological makeup encoded in DNA. So are all other people, who largely share that same DNA. You’re conscious. It’s not a big leap to conclude that so are other people, too.
This kind of solipsistic sophistry is not productive. It might be entertaining if you’re contemplating the underpinnings of epistemology for the first time in your life, but it’s not an honest contribution to the debate.
You might as well claim that you have no idea if gravity will be in effect tomorrow.
Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?
My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).
Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.
It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
That’s a fair objection. Having ruminated on it some more, I’ll admit it might be tenable.
As for achieving an effective ban, occupational collapse might be the stronger motivator once workplace adoption broadens and accelerates, but risk of epistemic collapse might register sooner among the general public, already broadly suffering slop.
Like Bill Gates, I wonder why it’s not yet become a theme in mainstream politics.
The challenge is that enforcing a ban would presumably require strict incursions into personal freedoms organized at a scale where AI-based solutions would be particularly effective and thus tempting, paradoxically.
On the other hand, assuming the dangers are real, you lose by default if you do nothing.
That's interpreting a failure to fight to preserve ethics as an internal rejection when it could be explained by a lack of fighting spirit, either because the fight seems impossible or the given hill not worth dying on. Another interpretation would be a comfort-oriented, avoidant, and possibly cynical culture facing a power imbalance.
Officials have made announcements that tie the alleged drone sightings to “capable” (e.g., foreign state) actors. How would stricter laws address that?
It’s also already illegal to fly drones above airports.
If this comment is an indication of how you approached the conversation, maybe you failed to convince your colleague due to a lack of specific arguments and an abundance of scornful conceit.
First of all, the WTC towers did withstand the impacts but collapsed due to the ensuing fires which weakened the remaining core columns (notably not due to collapsing floors, which did not in fact occur, according to Thornton-Tomasetti who have modeled the impacts and ensuing collapses as part of their forensic investigation commissioned for the insurance claim litigation).
Leslie Robertson, who lead the WTC structural engineering team along with John Skilling, is on tape making the 707 claim, but no surviving documentation has been uncovered to reveal the specific scenario that was modeled or the calculations used.
An important reason why the towers survived the impacts at all was the presence of the two hat trusses, which allowed the increasingly unsupported loads to be redistributed to the surviving exterior columns. Najib N. Abboud of Thornton-Thomasetti has given a detailed account of the findings of the forensic investigation that's available on Youtube[1].