Scott Alexander

They are staring at a screen."

Scott writes, Maybe this is a subspecies of the previous category.

Bringing a laptop to class makes lectures far more tolerable at the cost of learning 20% less material.

But also, quote, It's the phones, stupid.

They are absolutely addicted to their phones.

When I go work out at the campus rec center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones.

Sometimes I'm amazed that they ever leave their goon caves at all."

Suppose that screens genuinely harm many students.

Does that mean that parents should keep screens away from toddlers?

It depends on the mechanism of harm.

If phones harm kids by gradually damaging their brains somehow, chronic dopamine poisoning, I'm pretty sure this isn't a real thing, but I'm sure some self-help guru has an infomercial that disagrees, and this damage is worst during childhood, then sure, keep your kids away.

But if phones are merely very addictive, so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class, then it's less obvious that it matters.

You can't realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college.

If she has addictive tendencies, she's going to get addicted.

So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she's three years old by letting her go on toddler Instagram?

Here is an image of Scott's daughter holding a little toy.

It's a dog with a segmented body held together by little bits of rope and some wheels, such that imaginably you can pull it around on the ground and it would twist and turn.

She looks very happy to be holding the dog.

He captions this, My daughter would absolutely dominate toddler Instagram.

RIP to all the other toddler Instagram influencers.