I am pretty libertarian and don't always think involving The Law is the best option, but:
"It still seems highly plausible that this line of work [sextortion] attracts the worst of the worst."
Why on earth would we not aggressively prosecute this? (and other scams) In almost every case they are 1) using accounts on platforms that should have all kinds of reasons to help you counter them, 2) almost certainly not actually that technically sophisticated at covering their tracks and while obviously, yes, a lot of them are going to be 3) in different countries, we literally have a wide range of legal offensive capabilities (not exactly locked up in some high security CIA lab labeled Only For Use Against Iranian Nuclear Facilities) that can be deployed against people who have major-platform-accounts, IPs and bank accounts.
In the linked Twitter thread, there’s a link to a story that two guys who did it to over 100 victims were extradited from Nigeria to stand trial for it in the US. They were just convicted.
So it’s doable, and it’s starting to happen, prolly still just starting to ramp up because the law always takes a while to catch up to anything (and especially tech). I’d expect to see more prosecutions in the near future
On not engaging with sextortionists: this is very similar to advice given by Gavin de Becker about how to deal with stalkers. His book The Gift of Fear is likely required reading for those who want to learn how to deal with stalkers, or sextortionists. https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198
> You know what I’ve never heard? Someone who actually observed teenage girls using social media, and thought ‘yep this seems fine, I’ve updated towards not banning this.’
> If kids constantly being on phones during class is not hurting academic achievement, then that tells you the whole ‘send kids to school’ thing is unnecessary, and you should disband the whole thing.
> That is my actual position. Either ban phones in schools, or ban the schools.
I work at a child-led education school, it is my position that schools and not phones are the problem.
E.g. In this booklet (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56778757-how-children-acquire-academic-skills-without-formal-instruction) Peter Gray shows how during summer students' math reasoning ability increases, even though their math testing ability decreases. The TLDR is that schooling teaches children rote memorization and to actively not think, and when kids actually want to learn something they can learn it own their own 3-4x as fast, including math.
---
Really curious what you think about this. I really respect and admire how you interpret conflicting data. After looking through this stuff myself, I'm pretty convinced that smartphones and social media are much more a symptom than a cause. And that the cause is primarily the schooling system itself.
Re sextortion, I just don't understand why the victims care. Everyone has private parts and if I attached a photo of my junk to this post, nobody would be able to tell if it was really mine or not (even w/face ...there's this Photoshop thing). The fact that so many do care is the larger problem.
I’ll need to have The Talk with my kids some day: identifying low signal notifications and dark patterns, revoking notification permissions the first time an app interrupts for things that would never be useful to you.
In that study, the authors found that respondents claimed they would not want to delete their Facebook accounts unless you specify that their friends would all do the same, at which point they would not only welcome it but pay for that to happen. So pretty clearly expressing a preference for "no one is on it" > "I am on it and so are my friends" > "My friends are on it and I am not"
"A disinterested student without a phone will just tune out in some other way" seems like a very key point to me.
I'll agree that having a phone around is a tax on attention, but it's very low for me personally and when it's not this is trivially overcome by (adding the friction of) putting or leaving it in another room. I basically don't use my phone when I'm at home unless I'm waiting for something where I don't want to be so badly distracted that I can't put it down quickly--this isn't a flex, I spend 95% of my awake time at home at my desktop PC and probably like 90% of that on video games, but my desktop PC -also- has the advantage of requiring me to use it in a specific location. My wife knows to text me if I'm away from home because I'll definitely have my phone on me or message me on Discord if I'm at home because I'll probably be at my computer.
I guess I don't have any novel solution to suggest (aside from just do everything and anything you can to add friction I guess?) and I don't have kids but I hope people who view this as a problem are solving this on an individual level instead of -only- demanding society solve the problem for them.
> "A disinterested student without a phone will just tune out in some other way" seems like a very key point to me.
I'm not convinced. I mean obviously this is true on some level: it's extremely likely that the children who are the worst offenders for distracting phone use will also be relatively distracted, poor students if you take their phones away. That's not incompatible with phones being highly distracting for all (or most) students. In fact I suspect the incremental effect will be the strongest for the weakest students.
When I was in high school, smartphones hadn't been invented yet, so I carried around a fantasy novel to read when I got bored enough. For some strange reason, adults tended to approve of this.
Your point on allowing kids to use phones to do hacking things. Wouldn’t allowing them to use laptops instead of phones just work? I mean, it’s a great thing that, at least now, none of the crazy apps works great on a laptop.
With respect for you and Tyler Cowen, the Norway Smartphone Ban paper is not very good.
- No power to detect the kind of effect size we should be expecting, leads to massive error bars and ridiculous effect sizes (60% reduction in specialized care visits? When they still have at least full phone access 100hrs+ of the week? Come on...)
- Half the "bans" are actually schools instructing the pupils to put their phones on silent mode. This is very much de facto policy for any classroom, and it further makes effect sizes unbelievable.
- It's unexcusable to not have used those comparatively "lenient policy schools" as a control for the "stringent policy schools". Or at least, any other school.
- Most schools implemented "bans" in 2015-2017. Most of the effect is +3 ~ +5 years. Do we remember Covid happened? It may have worked both ways, I'm not sufficiently familiar with the Norvegian policy at the time (girls get more mentally ill or girls get less access to mental care) but one would expect Covid would be the leading cause of any effect in those years. It's not even mentioned in the paper!
For all those reasons and a couple others, I don't think there is any signal to be picked up from this paper.
Oh, and on top of my previous post I'll add it's actually the opposite of what you report, "lenient" bans lead to BIGGER effect sizes than "strict" bans (see page 42, 43)
"As always, school shootings are brought up, despite this worry being statistically crazy, and also that cell phone use during a school shooting is thought to be actively dangerous because it risks giving away one’s location. I can’t even.
The more reasonable objections are outside emergencies and scheduling issues, which is something, but wow is that a cart before horse situation. Also obviously there are vastly less disruptive ways to solve those problems. Mostly, I think staying in constant contact at that age is actively terrible for the students. You do want to be able to reach each other in an emergency, but there should be friction involved."
These seem like reasons somewhat optimised to sound good, especially those first ones. Say my real objection was:
"I think the Smartphones Bad data and analyses are all wrong and fake, my kids can make their own decisions, at least leave them the internet to distract themselves if you're going to lock them in a room and bore them to death."
Then I might be tempted to mumble something about emergencies and possible danger when questioned instead of saying what I actually think.
I sure would have found German high school even more miserable if I couldn't have read HPMOR and other fanfic under the table, but that's not what I would have said back then when questioned! Teachers might make your life harder and give you worse grades if you give answers like that.
> "I think the Smartphones Bad data and analyses are all wrong and fake, my kids can make their own decisions, at least leave them the internet to distract themselves if you're going to lock them in a room and bore them to death."
There may be some truth in this, but I don't think this is quite right. The first bit- I don't think smartphones are actually bad- maybe. But I don't think many parents are actually as anti-school as the latter half of this sentiment implies.
> As always, school shootings are brought up, despite this worry being statistically crazy...
This has always been my reaction and still is... however, last year there were 83 school shootings (a steady increase from ~20 shootings/year a decade ago). Even supposing that we maintain at 83, that is >996 shootings over a kid's >12-year school career. There are ~115k schools in the USA, so basically a child has a ~1% chance to experience a school shooting. I'm not sure if we can call school shooting thoughts statistically inconsequential, especially if we continue to see a rise. A kid starting 1st grade this year may experience a 2% chance if trends continue to rise.
* nearly 30 of those shootings were actually on college campuses. Actual "school" shootings are more like 50.
* deaths were significantly lower than shooting incidents (i.e. the average shooting killed less than one person). Your chance of actually being killed in a school shooting really is tiny, even in the US. Even injuries were barely higher than total incidents.
* one's chance of "experiencing" a school shooting are probably quite a bit lower than the chance of attending a school at which one occurs. Given the low death/injury rates, it's quite probable that most incidents were over before most pupils in the school even heard about them.
* there's no particular reason to expect school shootings to continue to rise. The last 3 years, for instance, have seen barely any change.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/childhood-and-education-8-dealing?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I am pretty libertarian and don't always think involving The Law is the best option, but:
"It still seems highly plausible that this line of work [sextortion] attracts the worst of the worst."
Why on earth would we not aggressively prosecute this? (and other scams) In almost every case they are 1) using accounts on platforms that should have all kinds of reasons to help you counter them, 2) almost certainly not actually that technically sophisticated at covering their tracks and while obviously, yes, a lot of them are going to be 3) in different countries, we literally have a wide range of legal offensive capabilities (not exactly locked up in some high security CIA lab labeled Only For Use Against Iranian Nuclear Facilities) that can be deployed against people who have major-platform-accounts, IPs and bank accounts.
Why shouldn't we demand this?
In the linked Twitter thread, there’s a link to a story that two guys who did it to over 100 victims were extradited from Nigeria to stand trial for it in the US. They were just convicted.
So it’s doable, and it’s starting to happen, prolly still just starting to ramp up because the law always takes a while to catch up to anything (and especially tech). I’d expect to see more prosecutions in the near future
That's fantastic, thanks for bringing it to my attention. Hopefully just the start!
On not engaging with sextortionists: this is very similar to advice given by Gavin de Becker about how to deal with stalkers. His book The Gift of Fear is likely required reading for those who want to learn how to deal with stalkers, or sextortionists. https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198
Excited to read this! Just gotta drop Peter Gray's response to the Anxious Generation. It blew me away. Curious what you think about it: https://petergray.substack.com/p/45-the-importance-of-critical-analyses
> You know what I’ve never heard? Someone who actually observed teenage girls using social media, and thought ‘yep this seems fine, I’ve updated towards not banning this.’
I can change that: https://petergray.substack.com/p/what-do-kids-at-a-center-for-self?utm_source=publication-search
---
> If kids constantly being on phones during class is not hurting academic achievement, then that tells you the whole ‘send kids to school’ thing is unnecessary, and you should disband the whole thing.
> That is my actual position. Either ban phones in schools, or ban the schools.
I work at a child-led education school, it is my position that schools and not phones are the problem.
E.g. In this booklet (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56778757-how-children-acquire-academic-skills-without-formal-instruction) Peter Gray shows how during summer students' math reasoning ability increases, even though their math testing ability decreases. The TLDR is that schooling teaches children rote memorization and to actively not think, and when kids actually want to learn something they can learn it own their own 3-4x as fast, including math.
---
Really curious what you think about this. I really respect and admire how you interpret conflicting data. After looking through this stuff myself, I'm pretty convinced that smartphones and social media are much more a symptom than a cause. And that the cause is primarily the schooling system itself.
The comments to his piece are quite disheartening.
If you're interested, here is his response to the comments: https://petergray.substack.com/p/follow-up-to-letter-45-comments-on/comments
Re sextortion, I just don't understand why the victims care. Everyone has private parts and if I attached a photo of my junk to this post, nobody would be able to tell if it was really mine or not (even w/face ...there's this Photoshop thing). The fact that so many do care is the larger problem.
I’ll need to have The Talk with my kids some day: identifying low signal notifications and dark patterns, revoking notification permissions the first time an app interrupts for things that would never be useful to you.
"For Instagram, I suppose as a non-user I can be indifferent, whereas many users feel like they have to be on it?"
There have been at least some attempts to test for this type of effect:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-product-markets-become-collective-traps-the-case-of-social-media/
In that study, the authors found that respondents claimed they would not want to delete their Facebook accounts unless you specify that their friends would all do the same, at which point they would not only welcome it but pay for that to happen. So pretty clearly expressing a preference for "no one is on it" > "I am on it and so are my friends" > "My friends are on it and I am not"
I only recently got my high-school kid a phone, and it was a flip phone that can text. No Internet.
"A disinterested student without a phone will just tune out in some other way" seems like a very key point to me.
I'll agree that having a phone around is a tax on attention, but it's very low for me personally and when it's not this is trivially overcome by (adding the friction of) putting or leaving it in another room. I basically don't use my phone when I'm at home unless I'm waiting for something where I don't want to be so badly distracted that I can't put it down quickly--this isn't a flex, I spend 95% of my awake time at home at my desktop PC and probably like 90% of that on video games, but my desktop PC -also- has the advantage of requiring me to use it in a specific location. My wife knows to text me if I'm away from home because I'll definitely have my phone on me or message me on Discord if I'm at home because I'll probably be at my computer.
I guess I don't have any novel solution to suggest (aside from just do everything and anything you can to add friction I guess?) and I don't have kids but I hope people who view this as a problem are solving this on an individual level instead of -only- demanding society solve the problem for them.
> "A disinterested student without a phone will just tune out in some other way" seems like a very key point to me.
I'm not convinced. I mean obviously this is true on some level: it's extremely likely that the children who are the worst offenders for distracting phone use will also be relatively distracted, poor students if you take their phones away. That's not incompatible with phones being highly distracting for all (or most) students. In fact I suspect the incremental effect will be the strongest for the weakest students.
When I was in high school, smartphones hadn't been invented yet, so I carried around a fantasy novel to read when I got bored enough. For some strange reason, adults tended to approve of this.
Your point on allowing kids to use phones to do hacking things. Wouldn’t allowing them to use laptops instead of phones just work? I mean, it’s a great thing that, at least now, none of the crazy apps works great on a laptop.
With respect for you and Tyler Cowen, the Norway Smartphone Ban paper is not very good.
- No power to detect the kind of effect size we should be expecting, leads to massive error bars and ridiculous effect sizes (60% reduction in specialized care visits? When they still have at least full phone access 100hrs+ of the week? Come on...)
- Half the "bans" are actually schools instructing the pupils to put their phones on silent mode. This is very much de facto policy for any classroom, and it further makes effect sizes unbelievable.
- It's unexcusable to not have used those comparatively "lenient policy schools" as a control for the "stringent policy schools". Or at least, any other school.
- Most schools implemented "bans" in 2015-2017. Most of the effect is +3 ~ +5 years. Do we remember Covid happened? It may have worked both ways, I'm not sufficiently familiar with the Norvegian policy at the time (girls get more mentally ill or girls get less access to mental care) but one would expect Covid would be the leading cause of any effect in those years. It's not even mentioned in the paper!
For all those reasons and a couple others, I don't think there is any signal to be picked up from this paper.
Oh, and on top of my previous post I'll add it's actually the opposite of what you report, "lenient" bans lead to BIGGER effect sizes than "strict" bans (see page 42, 43)
Absurd.
"As always, school shootings are brought up, despite this worry being statistically crazy, and also that cell phone use during a school shooting is thought to be actively dangerous because it risks giving away one’s location. I can’t even.
The more reasonable objections are outside emergencies and scheduling issues, which is something, but wow is that a cart before horse situation. Also obviously there are vastly less disruptive ways to solve those problems. Mostly, I think staying in constant contact at that age is actively terrible for the students. You do want to be able to reach each other in an emergency, but there should be friction involved."
These seem like reasons somewhat optimised to sound good, especially those first ones. Say my real objection was:
"I think the Smartphones Bad data and analyses are all wrong and fake, my kids can make their own decisions, at least leave them the internet to distract themselves if you're going to lock them in a room and bore them to death."
Then I might be tempted to mumble something about emergencies and possible danger when questioned instead of saying what I actually think.
I sure would have found German high school even more miserable if I couldn't have read HPMOR and other fanfic under the table, but that's not what I would have said back then when questioned! Teachers might make your life harder and give you worse grades if you give answers like that.
> "I think the Smartphones Bad data and analyses are all wrong and fake, my kids can make their own decisions, at least leave them the internet to distract themselves if you're going to lock them in a room and bore them to death."
There may be some truth in this, but I don't think this is quite right. The first bit- I don't think smartphones are actually bad- maybe. But I don't think many parents are actually as anti-school as the latter half of this sentiment implies.
> As always, school shootings are brought up, despite this worry being statistically crazy...
This has always been my reaction and still is... however, last year there were 83 school shootings (a steady increase from ~20 shootings/year a decade ago). Even supposing that we maintain at 83, that is >996 shootings over a kid's >12-year school career. There are ~115k schools in the USA, so basically a child has a ~1% chance to experience a school shooting. I'm not sure if we can call school shooting thoughts statistically inconsequential, especially if we continue to see a rise. A kid starting 1st grade this year may experience a 2% chance if trends continue to rise.
School shooting stats by year: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html
Mmm. OK, but a few counterpoints:
* nearly 30 of those shootings were actually on college campuses. Actual "school" shootings are more like 50.
* deaths were significantly lower than shooting incidents (i.e. the average shooting killed less than one person). Your chance of actually being killed in a school shooting really is tiny, even in the US. Even injuries were barely higher than total incidents.
* one's chance of "experiencing" a school shooting are probably quite a bit lower than the chance of attending a school at which one occurs. Given the low death/injury rates, it's quite probable that most incidents were over before most pupils in the school even heard about them.
* there's no particular reason to expect school shootings to continue to rise. The last 3 years, for instance, have seen barely any change.