Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The ages of distraction

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: The ages of distraction

#11

Post by mbrock »

raziel2701 wrote: post #3

Do the same complaints exist from thinkers/pholosophers of Asia? I feel like there is a substantial difference in thought from the Buddhists for instance, and the zen way of thinking that encourages people to accept who they are. This idea of self-improvement, which is what's at the bottom of all these critiques of the young being inattentive and distracted, is dismantled by people like Alan Watts who claims that the…

That sounds more like Western self-esteem teaching than Zen.

Watts was a very eclectic preacher with lots of different influences, both Western and Eastern.

For a random example of a Zen master discussing distraction, Foyan said something like "You're constantly distracted by thinking about business; how will you have time to work on enlightenment?"

And Huangbo said "If you would spend all your time—walking, sitting, standing, lying down—learning to halt the concept-forming activities your own mind, you could be sure of ultimately attaining the goal."

Re: The ages of distraction

#13

Post by gtirloni »

iliketosleep wrote: post #4

Distractions are not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, they aid the process of discovery. The issue is that nowadays our distractions are "on demand" and "personalized", which, if we're not careful, can take away the benefits and leave us worse off.

I think the overall complain is that discovery never gives way to creating and it frustrates people. Sort of like when we spend all day reading about which programming language is the best for this and that but there are zero lines of code written at the end of the day.

Re: The ages of distraction

#14

Post by ThomPete »

It's not the age of distraction, it's the age of extreme information accumulation.

The consequence of the lack of attentionspan is greatly exaggerated.

Our scientists aren't getting less able to do science, our writers and musicians aren't getting less able to write or perform. Our mathematicians aren't getting less able to solve mathematical problems.

In aggregate humans through the use of technology is charging on becoming ever more sophisticated. A society without technology would not be able to have accumulated the knowledge we have today. People without ability are being helped by technology.

With the worlds collective information doubling in something that resembles Moores Law for most people it would simply be unwise to focus too much.

What I think we need to realize is that we don't need everyone to be expert specialists. We need a mix of experts specialists and specialist generalists.

Re: The ages of distraction

#15

Post by nextos »

nuttinwrong wrote: post #5

As someone who at one point grew up without the internet, I think I can safely say that my attention has gone out the window with the web. There are just too many things to look at now and browser tabs are constantly competing for my attention. In fact, I would blame inattention for the lack of personal success in my life. Hell, it was even hard getting through the entire article, I just wanted to skip to the end and…

I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home. To give you an idea how uncommon this was already, during the first week an interview amongst the 375 enrolled students was conducted. I was the only one without a DSL or fiber connection at his disposal.

I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reason behind my success.

No connection forced me doing lots of things differently. For programming work, I relied only on offline documentation (man pages, MSDN...) and I set up my own servers instead of telnet-ing to the uni machines. The learning curve was a lot steeper, but after some struggle I was way more productive than my peers.

For freshman and sophomore theoretical courses, I simply cherry-picked top books with extreme care cause I knew I couldn't rely on help coming from the brand new forums for TAing our school had set up. Students hacked around exercises, but I had to fight the Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics and a few others.

It ended up as a huge success for me. I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time. This made me appreciate the value of deep and hard knowledge good books provide. Now, many years later I am struggling to return to that lifestyle while keeping some online presence...

Re: The ages of distraction

#16

Post by AznHisoka »

bcook wrote: post #8
pradex wrote: post #7

Personally I have been a victim of this, about 7-8 years ago I was so much able to sit at one place without a phone or internet and study for 14-16 Hours. And I loved how much I was able to do in a single day, but today I find reading a book or a long article so hard (Even while writing this comment I was distracted thrice by my phone beeping for attention), In last few days I have been trying hard to get back to how…

You gave the device access (to yourself), you must take it away... From the other side, I have very little social interaction (no phone or Facebook) and I'm not so sure it's a better choice. Sure, I have free time, but I am also "out of the loop", which has it's own social stigma.

Can you clarify how it makes you feel? Is it that you feel you are missing out on social interaction that you desire?

Re: The ages of distraction

#17

Post by iliketosleep »

gtirloni wrote: post #13
iliketosleep wrote: post #4

Distractions are not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, they aid the process of discovery. The issue is that nowadays our distractions are "on demand" and "personalized", which, if we're not careful, can take away the benefits and leave us worse off.

I think the overall complain is that discovery never gives way to creating and it frustrates people. Sort of like when we spend all day reading about which programming language is the best for this and that but there are zero lines of code written at the end of the day.

i see what you're saying, but i wouldn't say never. the odd time that distraction does lead to creation could in fact be very significant. i'd be very surprised if there weren't some startup ideas born out of distraction :)

Re: The ages of distraction

#18

Post by ranprieur »

This makes some important points but misses a big one: The authorities become concerned about people not paying attention, when the things they want people to pay attention to are not interesting.

Re: The ages of distraction

#19

Post by davnicwil »

nextos wrote: post #15
nuttinwrong wrote: post #5

As someone who at one point grew up without the internet, I think I can safely say that my attention has gone out the window with the web. There are just too many things to look at now and browser tabs are constantly competing for my attention. In fact, I would blame inattention for the lack of personal success in my life. Hell, it was even hard getting through the entire article, I just wanted to skip to the end and…

I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home. To give you an idea how uncommon this was already, during the first week an interview amongst the 375 enrolled students was conducted. I was the only one without a DSL or fiber connection at his disposal. I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reas…

> I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time.

Congratulations! I've never heard of a cross-university ranking of individual students before. Out of curiosity which country is that and how does the ranking work?

Re: The ages of distraction

#20

Post by adolfojp »

nuttinwrong wrote: post #5

As someone who at one point grew up without the internet, I think I can safely say that my attention has gone out the window with the web. There are just too many things to look at now and browser tabs are constantly competing for my attention. In fact, I would blame inattention for the lack of personal success in my life. Hell, it was even hard getting through the entire article, I just wanted to skip to the end and…

I'm experiencing the same thing. It's gotten so bad that I've had to train myself to concentrate by forcing myself to read books and watch movies without interruption. It's kind of ironic that I'm using what was once entertainment as homework. I call it Internet Brain because of a "Computing Forever" video that I watched on youtube. The fact that I live in a very noisy environment doesn't help at all.
Post reply on HN