Scott Alexander

Or does giving kids phones at age 3, when they have no hope of resisting, deny them the right to exercise their free will at age 18, when they might have some slight hope?

Do Kaplan's exhortations to remember the behavioral genetics literature apply here?

Will those with phone addiction genes get addicted no matter how we raise them?

Only 10% of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental, for example, potentially due to parenting.

Should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?

I feel about 75% sure that there's a trend towards recent intellectual decline which needs to be explained.

I think phones are about 60% of the explanation, and I think it's about 25% likely that early childhood phone use causes some damage beyond what would happen if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18, but then let him use them normally afterwards.

When I multiply those all out, there's an 11% chance that letting my kid use a phone will rot his brain.

I can already hear Brian Kaplan saying, that's not so high, that living with a stressed out parent who constantly resents the demandingness of childcare has a much more than 11% chance of being bad.

But it's not just addiction.

What if they wander into the wrong part of the internet and become incels?

Or SJWs with seven genders?

Or set of vacantists?

Lots of people get one or another mind virus.

Why should my kids be immune?

Because I'll give them a happy childhood?

I checked this on the ACX survey, and although alt-rightists did have significantly less happy childhoods than normal liberals 5.93 versus 6.70 on a 10-point scale, the effect was too weak to rely on on an individual level.

46% of alt-rightists had happier childhoods than the average liberal.

Also, I married the only centrist classical liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What kind of off-the-chart outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off?