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> I think that has to do with excessively long movies Anecdotal experience but we (n=2) didn't have the urge to pull out our phones on Oppenheimer (180 minutes).
Oppenheimer is not an action flick. :) Movies with a compelling story keep your attention, but with action, your brain can only take so much stimulation. Unless it has a really compelling story, your mind will wander.
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> Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min. I’ve read somewhere that blockbuster movies are trending longer at the moment, because people are ever less willing to pay the high prices for cinema tickets, drinks and snacks, so movie studios need to offer a really big experience to make it seem worthwhile.
I bought a projector and a popcorn machine, haven't been to the movies since.
Soooo how to we get it back?
• Call it "whiffreading" after the term in the Book of the Subgenius [1983]. A way to intuitively, instinctively and logically determine if you can get the sense of something quickly. If you sense it is worthy, you will invest the time in it. If not, and you feel you are wasting time, you skip it.
Quicker abandonments, glossing, and skipping ahead are all natural human adaptions to the increasing and constant bombardment of data and stimuli we are presented with. This is why we want the "tl;dr." This is why you want a 1-minute explainer video instead of a 30-minute or 1-hour lecture.
Now, if you catch someone's attention, they'll follow you down the rabbit hole and will keep reading or watching. Maybe for hours. Look at TikTok lives and Twitch streamers. People doomscroll, next, next, next... but as soon as they encounter the right content — whabam! They will stick there until the livestream ends.
Similarly, look at Hacker News itself. If a 1-sentence topic grabs your interest — whabam! You'll read the article (which could be thousands of words long) and you may engage in the threads of conversations, which could eat up your day.
Oppositely if a content creator bores people or if the audience start to sense what you are talking about is sus, or totally outside their interests, they'll just drop it. A post on Hacker News will sink like a rock in the middle of a very deep ocean.
Again, I propose this is an adaption to the environment. Time is speeding up. The onslaught of content trying to grab your attention is relentless. So this is the natural result.
There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more. Yes, there are costs -- deep work & study both suffer -- but there are benefits too: informational content that can be compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video…
You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory.
I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified" engineering curriculum would look like.
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> Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min. Not to mention an action scene gets really really boring after about 2min. Just more and more of the same. Then add the usual hyperactive editing popular in modern blockbusters and it's like "Yo can you slow down a little? I'd like to actually see a punch happen sometimes"
They're just bad now. You never get bored in Die Hard or a Jackie Chan flick.
Soooo how to we get it back?
I may be reading this incorrectly, but in the article, the 65% appears to be authors confidence in the statement that attention spans appear to be declining, as denoted by the sub-script. Whereas in the HN title it reads as if it's saying a "65% decline in attention span". Various other assertions in the post also have sub-script confidences associated e.g. "my guess: yes90%". I could totally believe that there has b…
Thanks for mentioning that book. I am trying to decide if it's worth reading. The negative reviews agree with the main premise of the book but say it's short and superficial. Is there information in there worth reading beyond the usual tips ie keeping your phone in another room, avoid news first thing in the morning, no screen time 2 hours before bed, long cardio workouts, etc?
It's also worth noting that Johann Hari has an extensive history as a liar.
Trying to read classic literature really makes this apparent. Hemingway's Sun Also Rises must have been a riveting adventure story when it was published in 1926, but how can it compete with 10,000 hours of adventure travel on youtube, netflix etc.? Same with Moby Dick in 1850s... these were glimpses into exotic lives rarely heard of back then, but today you can find those stories or similar in vivid moving pictures a…
I'd like to believe it is reversible. It's not a genetic problem so it is a problem of environment. If you tech detoxed for a whole year living in the woods or something then tried to read Moby Dick it would likely be very tolerable again. You could study some people who have gone to prison and have little opportunity for endless media consumption.