Dr. Richard Cytowic
speaker
37 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Richard Cytowic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The peer pressure is enormous. In D.C., we happen to have one of the Waldorf schools, and the Waldorf philosophy is no technology until about, I don't know, age 11. And I interviewed the principal and she said the hardest thing is getting the parents to agree to not have any technology. The kids are quite happy doing all their other stuff.
And, you know, and the argument that, well, they need to learn this for the future, their future occupation, etc. Well, by the time a three-year-old or a five-year-old is adept at whatever technology you're throwing at them, And by the time they get to be ready to work, that technology is going to be so obsolete that it won't matter.
So I don't see the argument that one needs to learn how to do this. I mean, President Obama not many years ago said, oh, kids need to learn how to code. Learning how to code will be as important as reading and writing arithmetic. Well, guess what? Now you could use ChatGP2 and all these AI tools to write code for you. So there's no need to know how to code.
So things become obsolete very, very fast. So I think it's hard to predict what people will need to know for the future because the future is very uncertain.
Well, then I'd smack the parents in the face and say, back off. You don't need to be in contact with them all the time. I mean, my parents didn't need to be in contact with me all the time. They knew I'd show up after school or during lunch or after recess and all that. So if there's such an emergency, they can call the school office and then the principal will come. bring the kid to the phone.
So I think that's just a ridiculous argument. I must be in contact. And I think what that's, I think shows helicopter parenting and that the parents are so anxious about losing control. And so that's their problem.
And, you know, they're welcome to have it, but I think it only makes them anxious. And so when you ask, like, what good does it do you to be so concerned that you have to reach your kid 24 hours a day and monitor them constantly and check on their whereabouts via app finders, what's wrong with you? Why can't you just let them be an adolescent or a teenager or an adult?
And this was a summer month, I take it?
So not only did he not have screens to distract him, but if he was there in the summer months, he was probably outdoors a lot of the time, and he got a lot of daylight exposure. And this is another thing is that... It used to be the parents would say, go out and play. Well, now nobody says go out, go outside. And so kids are not exposed to sunlight.
And again, other studies show that, like, for example, people have gone away to these camps where they had like 14 hours of daylight a day. And the only light was the firelight of in the evening, which is highly infrared. And they they came back entirely changed people and their sleep was so much improved. So, yes, your observation is spot on.
Well, the response to that is, why didn't you text back? I didn't need to. I will do so. I text back at 4 o'clock every afternoon, or I check my emails at 8 a.m. every morning, and that's it. There's no other window. And so the question is, why do you want to let other people dictate your attention span and your schedule. So this whole, I couldn't get hold of you.
It was, yes, you couldn't because I'm only on during these hours and here's where you can reach me. And Basically, the question is, what could possibly be so important that I have to drop everything and respond to your text or your email? In my own website, I have a way to contact me. And I've got, I think, three ways that says, you know, this is urgent. Number two, get back to me within a month.
Or three, get back to me if and when you can. And it's amazing. And I said, you know, please be specific about what you want, et cetera, what you want to ask. And it's amazing how people respond to that. And they follow that willingly. You know, once you set out guidelines of how to contact me, People act accordingly.
This is like Pavlov's dogs. You know, if you respond right away, indeed, you've trained people to know that you will respond right away.
Oh, listen, I'll be the first to admit that I'm just as guilty as everybody else to these forces. I know, except I know that what's going on, but yes, I will pick it up. I will scroll and I realize that I've spent, oh my God, I've spent, you know, 20 minutes on TikTok, et cetera. And it takes a lot of willpower to,
to say no to these things and ask, you know, is this really what I want to be doing with my time?
Thanks, Mike. It's been really pleasurable. It's been a hoot. Thank you so much for having me on.
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