Day 13 - Connection

Only a few more days to go, and this little experiment will be finished. And interestingly, I feel like I have learned a lot during this period. On the topic of keeping kids safe online, some of the conversations I’ve been having offline include:

Kids as young as 10 years old (4th and 5th) graders, mostly the boys, are “hacking” school computers so they can access pornhub and bring up disturbing images and videos on school campus. Teachers are not trained as IT professionals, nor do they want to be.
Kids in elementary school are experiencing sleep deprivation and are having behavior issues in class as a result of having devices (phones and tablets) in their rooms at night. The parents think their kids are sleeping, but the teachers see evidence to the contrary. What behaviors? Fragmented attention, falling asleep in class, the kids are tired and grouchy, like cranky babies.
Parents of girls who have gotten onto social media (almost all of them below the minimum age of 13 - how can we take age protections seriously from Meta when they still do nothing to stop underage kids from getting online?), report that their daughters are stressed, depressed, and anxious all the time. When they pry the phone away from their kids and force them to take a break, they return to “normal”.
Family therapists are getting pounded with requests from families about child behavior issues around devices.
Boys especially become violent when parents try to take their devices away. Fortnite is one of the biggest offenders.
New York City just passed a ban on phones in schools.
Every single person I talk to is fascinated by the brain development of children and the way video games are designed.
Parents are looking for solutions, like could video games help their autistic and ADHD children adapt?
Nongaming parents (and some gaming parents) have a hard time knowing what kind of games to pick for their kids.
Young adult men are just as fascinated by this topic as many parents. They have friends who have gotten lost and have lost motivation, and it frustrates them. They don’t know why they can’t just “fix themselves”. What is more, they know which games are awful and cheat. They are not happy about what is being done to them. They see the social pressure to play and conform, but they also know that what is happening in the games is not healthy or right.

All in all, people are frustrated at feeling powerless. These big tech companies seem to be able to do what they want to do without consequences, and the parents are left to pick up the pieces of their broken children’s lives. Young adults are frustrated because they see their friends suffering and even they themselves experience the broken offerings of these companies, and they know on some level it is not right, but what can they do about it?

I always go back to the core idea of engineering. First, understand the problem you are trying to solve. Also, you need a vision for what outcome you are trying to achieve? What does good, or final, or fixed look like?

Twenty or thirty years ago, we used to fret about kids sitting in front of TV’s and getting fat. Now, no one turns on the TV. True story. I travel with a little travel router and a Fire Stick— mostly because I think it’s cool to have all of my devices “pre-connected” to the router, and the router is capable of logging into captured networks like at hotels, conferences, or Airbnb. It also saves me from having to try and log things like my Remarkable or gaming device into a hotel internet connection, which they cannot do. The Fire Stick lets me watch my programming.

And yet… no one turns on the TV. Not at home. Not on the road. I know a lot of people my age who watch TV and love the portability of a Fire Stick. But none of my kids use it. They turn to their phones. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, (never Facebook or LinkedIn). Sometimes Snapchat. But the TV has collapsed as a form of entertainment in our house, and in the lives of my kids.

Truth be told, my wife spends most of her time watching videos on her iPad while cooking, and sometimes at night with her fancy noise-cancelling headphones. (Apple’s software is just magic; that you can move AirPods from device to device automagically is brilliant.)

But rarely is the TV on. At all.

As I said, my kids grew up with dumb phones. Phones that could call. Phones that could text. Phones with crappy cameras. But no internet. No apps. No social media. No games (beyond Snake. I swear Snake gets ported to every device imaginable).

Aside: If you think you don’t know Snake, I bet you do. It’s that game where you use arrow keys to move a line around the screen, avoiding other lines, and the longer you move, the longer the body of your “snake” becomes until you trap yourself and bump into your own body, ending the game.

The course of this experiment has also taught me some personal things.

Sharing questions is more compelling than sharing answers. Answers end conversations. Questions open conversations.
I did not do as much storytelling as I planned. I still gravitate toward translating ideas into simple systems that are easier to understand.
Shockingly, people see value in my “why it works like that” shares. They may not be as impactful as a story, but they are interesting nonetheless. I think most people do want to understand the way the world works.
This problem is real, it is massive, and it is affecting an enormous segment of our population.
Despite the chaos and instability in the economy right now, the culture wars, and the bitter bipartisan disputes of our political landscape, there is near-universal agreement that children should not be anxious, depressed, afraid, strung out, and sleep-deprived. None of this is good for the kids, the families that are raising them, or the teachers trying to educate these kids. We are not imagining this. The struggle is real.

The Systematic Destruction of Norms

That reminds me, there is an important aspect of how the social media platforms harm girls, and it is related to anomie, or normlessness. The algorithms promote novelty relentlessly, which leads to elevating the prestige of more extreme behaviors. Kids attempting to discover their own identity often emulate these behaviors, which creates two problems. 1. The behaviors are extreme, which is often dysfunctional, and 2. Because they are novel, they don’t last when they become popular and they rotate back out to the fringe, being replaced by whatever is novel next. What I describe as decent behaviors, ways, and modes of living that have been proven over time, rarely get elevated, prioritized, or promoted, so instead of learning what works and is sustainable, kids get trained more or less in failed, maladaptive coping strategies that are doomed to fail because their only redeeming quality is that they are “novel”.

Think of it this way. In business, we put a lot of value on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), also known as Best Practices. It just makes sense that if you figure out the best way to do something, you want everyone to do that and to get as good at that as possible.

Now imagine, your company had a new way of selecting its practices. Not on effectiveness or success but on novelty. What is the weirdest practice? And, your roll-out and adoption strategy is that as soon as enough (arbitrary number decided by a hidden algorithm) people start to implement that strategy, it is no longer considered novel and a new strategy is elevated as The One To Emulate, leading to a consistently and persistently fractured set of behaviors within your organism as some people who experience success during the last cycle, cling to their modes of operating while new people who missed out on the old way, fly to the new way in hopes of elevating their status.

On second thought, maybe companies have their own way of doing this with the rapid rate of change of executives. However, usually (but not always) the financial discipline of tracking what works brings some kind of balance.

But, by and large the most respected companies, the brands we admire, and definitely the ones that control the algorithms adhere to the concept of best practices. It is the users and the community who suffer because this process by design generates instability. There are no norms, nothing to measure yourself against. Everything becomes relative and our intrinsic systems for understanding the value of things like human behavior are consistently, and persistently undermined. Being different enough to be novel and therefore command attention becomes the law of the land, which is exhausting, ineffective, and largely unsustainable. Why are we doing this to our kids?

Idaho

I am sitting at an Airbnb in Idaho, with other family members who have come into town for Rebecca’s graduation. I heard recently that you get to spend 20 years with your kids. 18 as they go through school, then another 2 years spread over the rest of their lives in small chunks, a day here, a holiday there. The longer I love, the more I admire the families that found a way to live close to each other and stay in near-constant contact.

I have learned to see these days as precious. Our adult kids are now moving fully into discovering their own lives, making their own decisions. For my part, I am trying to learn how to be a father to such self-reliant, wonderful people. They are raised. What is the best, most effective relationship I can imagine?

I will say this. First, they are my favorite people to hang around. They know me and love me for myself. Second, I compete with my wife in a friendly way to be their biggest fans. I still worry about them (I suppose I always will), but through experience and my own maturity, I can now recognize that their struggles are their own. They are meant for them. They learn by growing through these cycles. I cannot, nor should I, try to take them away. At the boundary of our ability and comfort, we grow. And they inspire me to do the same. This blog post started out as something deeply uncomfortable for me because I was not sharing my answers and thus proving my intelligence (I am still waaaay too wrapped up in valuing my intelligence as a core value of my worth as a person). Sharing my ignorance was not easy for me. But ignorance is not a bad thing. Ignorance, the state of not knowing, is fine, in my mind, as long as it leads to questioning and thus learning. And the more I learn, well, I have heard it said knowledge is like an island in the sea of ignorance. The more you know, the larger the island, the more coastline touches the sea of ignorance. Put simply, the more you know, the more you don’t know. Stupidity, however, is an inability or an unwillingness to learn. When we are stupid, we are being arrogant, stubborn, or unwilling. I am not stupid, and I try not to behave in stupid ways.

However, I will add this. The current most widely accepted definition of intelligence (used by nearly all AI companies, by the way) I learned from Stuart Russell in his book Human Compatible.

Intelligence is the ability for actions to achieve intended outcomes.

That, believe it or not, is a shockingly narrow definition of intelligence. But, let’s accept it for a second as true. If we do accept it, then it means when our actions do not produce the intended outcome, we are by definition stupid. This problem has been haunting students and learners for far longer than social media and smartphones. In the era of the highly educated adult, mistakes are not seen as opportunities to learn, no matter what the memes may say. The way most of us were raised and educated, mistakes are proofs of stupidity.

This is not just some abstract problem that only engineers face, although we may get a heavier dose of it than most. I learned from my father that being intelligent as an engineer was gold, it was the currency of successful engineering. The smartest engineers were their intellect. And really, that’s the twin pairing - smart vs stupid. We all want to be smart. We all fear being stupid.

Sharing this blog the way I am, reveals that there are a lot of things I don’t know. And the more questions I answer, the more questions I get. It feels endless.

This is one reason why I do like being an engineer. I don’t have to answer all the questions, just the one in front of me in a way that solves the problem I am trying to solve.

So if I can find answers, best practices, and techniques to solve the problem, then I can move forward. I am not required to answer all the questions that may come up, or prove everything that I know. Just leave the situation better than I found it.

Aside: Are we more open to listening to AI than other people? I have a friend who uses AI to help him round out his thinking. He had a partner who he couldn’t get along with and they went their separate ways. It seems from the outside he is more open to listening to the computer than to his partner. I wonder what the difference is or was?

The Greenbelt

Boise, Idaho, has this amazing green belt that runs for some 40 miles (I guestimate), about 20 miles in each direction from Boise State’s main campus. We headed north on Lime Scooters and explored. We eventually ended up at a wine tasting room and kicked back to enjoy a bottle of rosé. It was such a beautiful day. I could have spent all day there drinking wine and hanging out, but more family is coming in, and we still needed to pick up a cake for graduation.

But it is days like these that are a total blessing. Blue sky, light, fluffy Toy Story clouds, cool breeze, river flowing behind green trees nearby, and cold wine with loved ones. Man, life is good. I am so blessed.

I will sign off for today as I focus my attention on the rest of the family as they arrive from Phoenix.