[pwinnski]

I'm sorry, I fail to see how providing a counter-example to someone pooh-poohing phone use by children is now analogous to advocating for productive cocaine use.

It seem unproductive to deal with bizarre flights of fancy on the part of HN commenters, so I'll get back to my phone or something else productive now.

[RonanTheGrey]

I explicitly added the disclaimer to preempt your attempt to ignore my question, which you did anyway. Fantastic.

You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.

[pwinnski]

Okay, I'll try this one last time. Please try to read the whole comment, rather than getting hung up on one element of it. You know, like you incorrectly suggest I did.

This thread exists on a post where someone laments that their child, upon turning 10, stopped making arts and crafts, and started maintaining social media accounts and spending a lot of time on her phone.

This thread itself started with someone pushing back against the assumptions in that article, pointing out that many of us of a certain age dealt with what sound like similar argument, spending all of our time on a newfangled computer, indoors, when "normal" kids were outside doing outside things. Or in this particular case, spending time on the computer instead of studying. I relate to this, because while my parent were more supportive, I too spent my childhood on a series of entry-level computers: a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, a Commodore VIC-20, and so on.

That comment, and therefore this thread, specifically says, "who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society." So true!

Then another user, seemingly not able to understand how computers seemed like an incredible dead-end waste of time in the early 1980s, suggests that phones are completely different, because "your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities."

That's the context in which I posted. Remembering that what seemed like a completely dead-end waste of time turned out to be one of the best careers in the world, and seeing how dismissive the most recent comment was.

So I tried to give an example, just one example, to show how the parent commenter's assumptions resulted in an unfair blanket statement. On a thread about a little girl who doesn't color now that she found Instagram. Within the context of "lead[ing] to job opportunities."

Does that make sense now? Obviously most people aren't going to derive their primary income from streaming in the future. I never made that claim.

It turns out 99.9% of people who color and make string art and fashion paper clothes for dolls also don't end up making a career out of that when they're adults. In fact, given a 10-year-old child, perhaps job opportunities shouldn't even be the primary concern.

So your most recent comment says I ignored your question, which is weird, because I didn't actually see a question mark:

You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)

I still don't see what sort of question you were trying to ask there, or I'd try to answer it.

Now you're mentioning statistics, which is interesting to me. What exactly is the statistic on what's going to happen 15 years from now when this 10-year-old kid is entering the work force? How are these future statistics derived, anyway? Man, what I would have given for such a thing back when I was ten!

Given how people are, I'm guessing my attempt to remind you of the context in which these comments exist will fail. But hey, my parents insisted I spend time as a youngster writing, so it's good practice.

TL;DR: You don't know what the future holds for the current generation of young kids using phones, and neither do I. But the present hold many surprises for those in the past who never could have predicted that I would end up making a nice living with those weird computer things, or that people could possibly ever earning a living making YouTube videos or playing video games on twitch or doing whatever an instagram influencer does, and there are probably many, many, many more people involved in video editing and production today than one might have expected 15 or 20 years ago.

That's all. Don't be so quick to assume that smartphones--or any other technology--are 100% bad. That's it. That's the only thing I was saying.

P.S. Personally, I don't think the kid's problem is the phone, but the social media. TikTok and Instagram are a poison to humanity.