BostonFern

The famous Oracle of Delphi in Ancient Greece was said to be the center of the universe in its time. Kings, generals, and officials from poleis across and from without Greece would seek the Oracle’s counsel on important decisions.

Stories of Apollo’s favor and hallucinogenic gases abound, but I think the late Yale professor of Ancient Greek history, Donald Kagan, explained it best:

“Now, you can bet when these folks came and consulted the priests and said, ‘could you please put us down on the list, we want to consult the oracle’, the priests said ‘sure, have a beer, let's talk about your hometown, what's going on out there’. What I'm suggesting to you is that this was the best information gathering and storing device that existed in the Mediterranean world. These people knew more than anybody else about these things, and so consulting that oracle was a very rational act indeed.”

It’s not open-source, but I enjoy using Affinity, especially the updated version after it was acquired by Canva.

Then present your evidence, so we can have a substantive debate and draw informed conclusions.

In Scandinavia in particular, there’s a tendency of pescatarians to refer to themselves as vegetarian for social convenience, but that hasn’t changed the definition of “vegetarian”.

No idea? Really?

You’re an intelligent mammal, your biological makeup encoded in DNA. So are all other people, who largely share that same DNA. You’re conscious. It’s not a big leap to conclude that so are other people, too.

This kind of solipsistic sophistry is not productive. It might be entertaining if you’re contemplating the underpinnings of epistemology for the first time in your life, but it’s not an honest contribution to the debate.

You might as well claim that you have no idea if gravity will be in effect tomorrow.

Tougher adblocking is the best argument I’ve heard.

Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?

My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).

Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.

It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.

To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.

That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and ethics, not with technology.

That’s a fair objection. Having ruminated on it some more, I’ll admit it might be tenable.

As for achieving an effective ban, occupational collapse might be the stronger motivator once workplace adoption broadens and accelerates, but risk of epistemic collapse might register sooner among the general public, already broadly suffering slop.

Like Bill Gates, I wonder why it’s not yet become a theme in mainstream politics.