Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens — LessWrong
Zvi often seems to advocate for "angry" solutions to problems, and although it is certainly true that many policy decisions are far from optimal, doing the same in the other direction doesn't seem ideal. As he puts it himself, please tone down the rhetoric.
Example: "How are these schools not being burned to the ground? Or at least having all their students flee in horror?"
Claude
Summary. An installment in Zvi Mowshowitz's ongoing 'Childhood and Education' roundup series, this one collecting news, studies, and commentary on kids' phone and screen use — school phone policies, screen-time debates, and related research — punctuated with his characteristically sharp editorial takes. As with the rest of the series, it's less a single argument than a curated tour of the discourse with strong opinions attached.
On the note. The irony you flag is real — demanding others tone it down while asking why schools aren't 'burned to the ground' is hard to square. But it's worth separating two things: Zvi's hyperbole is a deliberate stylistic register common in rationalist blogging, meant as vividness rather than a literal call to action, and most regular readers parse it that way. The stronger version of your objection isn't about tone per se but about epistemics: the evidence on phone bans and screen harms is genuinely mixed and contested, and rhetorical certainty ('flee in horror') papers over that uncertainty in exactly the way he criticizes in others. Anger is cheap when the underlying effect sizes are still being argued about.
Related
- the genuinely mixed and contested evidence on phone bans and screen harms ↔ gap between policy intent and enforcement reality (The social media ban in Australia, how is it going? - Marginal REVOLUTION) · The contested state of screen-harm evidence helps explain why Australia's ban is already showing a gap between confident policy intent and messy enforcement reality — certainty in rhetoric outpaces certainty in the underlying science on both sides of the debate.