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

Our attention span is being robbed

unstructed.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 161 posts

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#71

Post by thenerdhead »

> How to fight back?

> Honestly? I have no idea.

I went through this journey recently and wrote an entire book on it. I think it takes a hell of a lot of mindfulness practices after one becomes aware of the problem.

Just 4 years ago I would read maybe 1-2 books a year as an educated person. Now fast forward to today and I read at least a book every week. I'm sure someone will say "how much do you actually remember", and that largely doesn't matter because one of the beautiful paradoxes is that you change through the books you read and hardly remember what you read in the first place.

My attention span has been expanded by my mindfulness. You break away from a negative frame and create a new positive frame.

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#72

Post by [deleted] »

redeux wrote: post #70
Eleison23 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite resources for "mindfulness": 1. Believe in Jesus 2. Explore contemplative traditions of Hesychasm, Centering Prayer, Hesychasm, Carmelite mystics, etc. If you attempt to divorce mindfulness meditation from spirituality or even from experience of a transcendent Divinity, you're asking for trouble.

What about Buddha, or Brahma, or Zeus? Do those work as well?

[deleted]

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#73

Post by thenerdhead »

judah wrote: post #35

Thinking out loud here...is it possible to use the same patterns for good? Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?

Not from this blog article's premise. The whole argument that Postman has is that education should not be "edutainment". He's quite against Sesame Street for propagating the idea that everything we do has to be entertaining rather than taken seriously.

The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#75

Post by gremlinsinc »

twstdzppr wrote: post #45

> Maybe something that I’ve learned in therapy COULD be entertained as a possibility. It’s a technique that I don’t even know HOW it’s called but it boils down to dedicating 45mins to grievance. As in – you dedicate 45mins per day when you can focus on grieving (e.g. over a failed relationship) and at any other time of the day you have to delay doing it until your 45-mins-of-grief time comes. 45min-1hr of mindfulness…

I think that sounds like a good idea, but I'd maybe divy time up differently. Maybe devote an hour on Sunday for grief, anger, letting out all the negativity, then on other days spend maybe 20 minutes a day thinking about the best things that happened to you that day, right those down, and perhaps when it gets to sunday you might find you don't have anything to grieve this week. An hour a day to negativity would ruin me, but I think maybe constructively using it to fuel up some addrenaline to attack the next week could be good.

Maybe a better practice though to print out some tokens that represent your anger, tape them to a punching bag and let out your steam that way, plus you get dopamine, etc from exercise.

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#76

Post by cobertos »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #65
tayo42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you really feel like you learn a language with duolingo though? everytime ive tried to learn a language i got much further doing it by studying a book.

so... repetition I find is very important for speaking and writing. Duolingo nails that. In the same way German class in high school did, hours of practice really helped my speaking. Now I can't really put together sentences - but I have a decent shot at deciphering my mom while she speaks to my grandomther in german, or reading an article. So I think duolingo attacks that nicely. If you want a lot of vocab and readi…

I always struggled with the learning grammar mechanisms in Duolingo. I liked it for learning words in another language though.

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#77

Post by sk55 »

_mhr_ wrote: post #50
twstdzppr wrote: post #45

> Maybe something that I’ve learned in therapy COULD be entertained as a possibility. It’s a technique that I don’t even know HOW it’s called but it boils down to dedicating 45mins to grievance. As in – you dedicate 45mins per day when you can focus on grieving (e.g. over a failed relationship) and at any other time of the day you have to delay doing it until your 45-mins-of-grief time comes. 45min-1hr of mindfulness…

What's your favorite resource for learning mindfulness?

Try "Waking Up" course by Sam Harris. 10 mins a day for 30 days. You'll probably be more mindful after that.

It's an iPhone or Android app.

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#78

Post by dec0dedab0de »

I know mine is, and that I am extremely susceptible to all of these techniques.

That said, this bit about books is a bit much "They are NOT made to be amusing, but to be EDUCATIONAL. INFORMATIONAL. Eye-opening" I don't know the stats, but a good chunk of books are meant to be amusing.

If anything we've learned to communicate better through the written word than ever before in history. I am reminded of this xkcd from 2014 https://xkcd.com/1414/

I suspect that in an alternate timeline without the internet or television we would have much lower literacy rates, and a public less informed about the real world. Most people would spend their time talking to one another, building more meaningful relationships, and believing in nonsense their friends and family relayed incorrectly.

Maybe so many of us allow our attention span to be robbed, because so many more of us see the world for what it is, have resigned ourselves to our place in it, and would rather not think about these painful truths every day. Maybe if we kept sequestering knowledge on dead trees, only to be consumed by a small privileged audience and created by an even smaller more privileged group of creators blessed by institution, then more people would be blissfully unaware of the problems in the world and wouldn't crave distraction.

I had another point but my adderall is wearing off and I can't remember.

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#79

Post by JackFr »

I’m sympathetic to this argument to some extent…

And yet…

Just choose to read a book. Drop Facebook. Stop reading Twitter and scrolling through TikTok. I’ve come to believe it’s really that simple.

Or don’t. Totally up to you.

But the idea that something is being done to you is both seductive and lazy. Take responsibility, act intentionally and don’t worry about it.

Re: Our attention span is being robbed

#80

Post by Aditya_Garg »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #64
tomrod wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been frustrated by the Kindle App for this very reason. It should be infinite scroll!

The Kindle app’s infinite scroll is what finally made me let go of paper books. It’s that good. I get completely immersed. Can’t do it on an e-ink device, only on phone or tablet. Don’t forget to shut off the progress indicator or location or whatever they call it. Not knowing how far along you are is the other transformative feature of ebooks. In paper books, you always see the end coming.

On the kindle oasis (highest end model) no matter how many times you turn off the progress indicator, it always pops back up the next time you read the same book. Completely kills the immersive experience you’re talking about
Post reply on HN