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

We need to reclaim our attention

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 458 posts

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#131

Post by wutbrodo »

praveen9920 wrote: post #87

> … It’s when you are doing something meaningful to you, and you really get into it, and time falls away, and your ego seems to vanish, and you find yourself focusing deeply and effortlessly… Oh. Have I missed “the flow”. I have been trying to get back into the mode from a while, with lot of self doubt in mind, “ you are just lazy”, “you are too distracted by Twitter “, “were you like this all along”.. It hit me hard…

I'm glad that the article specified that individual effort is important. Too often, people act as if a collective solution is exclusive of the ability to improve your personal situation in the meanwhile (this accounts for probably 95% of usage of the term "victim-blaming" that I see online, including on HN)

But I'm also a strong believer that raw willpower is a poor substitute for a supportive environment. I've had great results the last 15 years from identifying rough edges in my computing workflows and sanding them off with scripts and OS tweaks. Between the rise of the Internet attention ecosystem and my own higher bar for focus as I get older, more and more of this iteration loop has been consumed by optimizations to improve focus and prevent distraction. "Automating willpower" like this has borne some pretty fantastic results when it comes to my ability to focus and thus both my productivity and mental health.

Sadly, most people don't use a proper general-purpose OS like a Linux distro[1], and are locked out of the ability to change much of their environment. Mobile devices remain a stubborn challenge: While I'm considering getting back into rooting my devices after a decade, this is a pretty poor substitute for a proper OS, so I'm also trying to build habits that shift usage from my phone to my laptop.

In the event that you haven't tried scripting up guardrails against attention hazards (or are still using an OS that prohibits you from using your computer fully), I strongly recommend taking a serious look at this approach.

[1] I'm explicitly excluding Windows due to my familiarity with the severe limitations it puts on the user, all smartphone OSes are the most egregious offenders, and my familiarity with OS X is lower but I gather that it falls between Windows and a Linux distro in terms of how much it babies/limits the user.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#132

Post by Apocryphon »

thegrimmest wrote: post #127
Apocryphon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if total economic freedom resulted in the reduction of other freedoms

Which other freedoms are you referring to? How would they be reduced by total economic freedom? I don't see how economic freedom would lead directly to violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#133

Post by zippystrider »

slibhb wrote: post #42

> Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. I agree with them. It's hard to pay attention to something for long unless it's entertaining. Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply. This isn't new. The mista…

The ease of access of today's distractions leads me to disagree.

It's so easy to take out your phone to check a social media app, or open a tab on your laptop to a social media website like Reddit, versus turning on a radio or getting up to turn on the TV.

A comic book doesn't fit in your front pocket, but a phone does; there's just so much less friction for distraction today.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#134

Post by dahart »

Nathanba wrote: post #79
batch12 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, these examples- radio and TV aren't even in the same league as the manipulation and engagement that comes from the algorithmic feedback loop that backs these services. The comparison is dangerously dismissive.

Surely TV and radio also have algorithms behind them determining how to increase viewership. Facebook and Instagram do the same but in realtime with more knobs to turn. I personally don't quite understand how somebody can get addicted to social media but I understand video games and I would support some kind of government bureau that determines the addictiveness of a game and puts a label on it. For example games tha…

> Surely TV and radio also have algorithms behind them determining how to increase viewership

What do you mean by this? Until very recently, TVs and radios never had the ability to report feedback on what people were consuming or whether people were watching ads. There were some surveys like Nielsen ratings that involved a small sample of people installing special hardware. TVs and radios have never served personalized results to individuals, even if there were “algorithms” involved — the targeting was toward the entire population at once, not to each an every person viewing. For most of TV & radio history, the “algorithms” were people and not computers, people manually sifting through data for weeks just to see if a show was popular.

It’s pretty odd to suggest that TV & radio was historically similar to what’s going on with today’s social media. Serving personalized results and gathering instant personalized viewing habits (“engagement”) is what’s fundamentally different than TV & radio, the feedback cycle fundamentally changed from a slow group feedback to a fast individual feedback, and that’s precisely why social media is more engaging and more dangerous.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#135

Post by thegrimmest »

Apocryphon wrote: post #132
thegrimmest wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which other freedoms are you referring to? How would they be reduced by total economic freedom? I don't see how economic freedom would lead directly to violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I agree that the maintenance of the common physical environment we live in should be regulated, but that's not what we're talking about here is it? We're talking about regulating interaction between people, which is inherently paternalistic.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#136

Post by daniel-cussen »

Aromasin wrote: post #80
batch12 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, these examples- radio and TV aren't even in the same league as the manipulation and engagement that comes from the algorithmic feedback loop that backs these services. The comparison is dangerously dismissive.

As far as I've read, based on research around attention and focus behaviors, the context switching element of it is the most dangerous part in terms of developing ADHD type behaviors, and I agree that TV and radio doesn't even scratch the amount of switching that happens with modern social media. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them make you switch context every 30 seconds or less, often for hours on…

Documents, radio, television, internet, social media. Baby steps.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#137

Post by watwut »

zippystrider wrote: post #133
slibhb wrote: post #42

> Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. I agree with them. It's hard to pay attention to something for long unless it's entertaining. Reading a book, reading a paper, etc -- these activities take discipline that most people don't develop or don't often apply. This isn't new. The mista…

The ease of access of today's distractions leads me to disagree. It's so easy to take out your phone to check a social media app, or open a tab on your laptop to a social media website like Reddit, versus turning on a radio or getting up to turn on the TV. A comic book doesn't fit in your front pocket, but a phone does; there's just so much less friction for distraction today.

And still, very few people read social media till they sleep deprived themselves. Very few people end up yelling at everyone around when something does not work out in game. Both of these are fairly common for gamers, but computer games are always defended here.

So yeah, it is pure moral panic, except about something average HN commenter does not think he do.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#138

Post by ectopod »

mwattsun wrote: post #116
Swizec wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kids are getting VR headsets and going to a place where there is no parental control because adults don't understand VR or how to join their kids there Sounds like early social media. Hanging out without parents was the crucial feature. I’m 34 now and having parents on social media still feels like an odd concept

I had to ask myself why VR was different and it's because there's no screen that a parent can monitor. Once a child puts the glasses on, who knows where they go are where they are? I think parents will demand a screencast feature built in so they can at least watch what their kids are doing.

I don't think parents will demand anything. They will continue to assume that somebody else is making it safe for their children.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#139

Post by Apocryphon »

tomjen3 wrote: post #7
jmfldn wrote: post #2

This for me is key, these sorts of problems cannot just be solved on an individual level. They are systemic. "Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attentio…

> It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable And yet we have worn masks for months at least. If the price of a free internet is the equivalent of wearing a gasmask then I would rather do that, at least until we we have the equivalent of the nano-robot immunesystem from the Diamond Age. If we let the government make the rules here we will lose the last place where we ca…

Regardless if the solution is government intervention, it seems rather funny to say the modern internet is a place that all entrants can play freely. It’s changed quite a bit since when The Diamond Age was first written.

Re: We need to reclaim our attention

#140

Post by zippystrider »

le-mark wrote: post #25
jacquesm wrote: post #8

There is a veritable war going on for your attention, and the battlefields are your eyeballs, your ears and ultimately your brain. Psychologists have been enlisted, as they are in every war to try to win it for 'their side', be it one of the big silos or some dying TV or newspaper era behemoth, there is no reasonable way in which you can withstand that kind of frontal onslaught. The only way to really deal with this…

Recently my son (8) was talking about how cool his uncles vr headset is and made the leap to what if that was in your brain! I was impressed he made that connection. Then I reminded him how all the games on his iPad forced him to watch ads, wouldn’t that be a similar situation, only in his brain? His eyes got wide then he got a disgusted look on his face. He agreed that would suck. I personally think there have alway…

If you install and adblocking app on the iPad, your son can see fewer ads (e.g. AdGuard, AdBlock) on these games. Alternatively, you could set up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi to block ads across the network.
Post reply on HN