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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#111

Post by mbesto »

Tenoke wrote: post #89
bizzleDawg wrote: post #21

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…

It would be nice if HN titles actually had to match submission titles.

Relax, dang usually fixes them anyway

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#112

Post by WaitWaitWha »

Permit me to tie a couple of personal observation on this topic.

I do not think we "lost" our ability. I think we changed our thinking.

I think the world has mostly accepted the "good enough" versus "perfect". As we all have heard, to become an expert, on average we need to pursue the subject for 10 thousand hours (? Malcolm Gladwell). But, we do not need to spend 20 years practicing. We can obtain "good enough" in a few weeks, or even few hours (obviously depending on the subject).

For example, to win the Grand Prix de la baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris (i.e., French Baguette Competition of Paris), many spend a lifetime perfecting their craft. I can teach you in a day how to make an edible baguette that the average consumer will enjoy.

I think our "attention span" has shifted to "good enough" in many instances. I do not think this destroyed our attention span capability, it just made it slightly different.

Final anecdote to "prove" my point we did not lose our attention. I have taken ADHD-diagnosed boys to camp and fish. Of the twelve (ages 12-16), only one could not sit patiently and watch the line and bobber for extended period. He became bored, and started whittling for the same amount of time. Once they returned to "civilization", they "became" ADHD again.

As someone already noted, in my experience humans cannot multitask. We can context switch, some very slowly, and some very fast. But, we do not multitask.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#113

Post by cwkoss »

abyssin wrote: post #71
jjoonathan wrote: post #33

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…

Do you have an example of such a skill that has been compressed?

Recipe tiktoks are like 30 seconds long - faster to watch the whole thing than scrolling to find the recipe on a bloated blogspam recipe site.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#115

Post by colechristensen »

jjoonathan wrote: post #33

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…

But also now I have a magical machine in my pocket where I can tap the screen a few times and get a book read to me sped up to my optimal input speed.

Those two things (audiobooks on my phone, the default feature to enable play at 2x-3x speed) have vastly increased the information I absorb.

Now if only someone could come up with a screen/document reader with a decent text-to-speech and decent content filtering, it would be truly magical (read just the bulk text not and don't vocalize every single piece of text, most of which are major distractions to flow and don't need to be read)

Part of the reason I'm learning a bunch of ML things is so I can make this for myself.

On that topic, does anyone know of a really good, open, text to speech model? All of the ones I have been able to find have ranged between garbage and mediocre, none near "good enough" for the thing to be useful to me.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#116

Post by ryandrake »

eikenberry wrote: post #36
cglong wrote: post #5

I went to a theater to watch Mission: Impossible last night. It has a really long runtime (2h 48m) and, toward the end of the film, I started seeing multiple people pull out their phones for a time check; I had to stop myself from doing the same.

I think this says more about the quality of the movie than it does people's attention spans. A movie that doesn't keep you sucked in until the end is just a bad movie.

Look at Avatar (2009) vs the sequel. The original was ~3 hours long, and a pretty ok movie. Kept the attention of everyone in my family from beginning to end. The sequel was 15 minutes longer, but we gave up before the end of the first hour because it was atrocious, particularly the paper-thin "dude, bro" writing.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#117

Post by bluefishinit »

carabiner wrote: post #41

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…

Pick up some Dostoyevsky, it's still some of the greatest prose ever written and still feels very fresh.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#118

Post by bamfly »

Aaronstotle wrote: post #95

I know my attention span has declined, whats difficult for me is I work in an IT role so its very interrupt driven, happens through tickets or direct messages. (Got a slack message while writing this message!) One of my favorite things about cycling is it forces me to stay focused while I'm on the bike, I can't look at my phone or do something else.

My pet-hypothesis is that part of the problem isn't the tech per se, but that office workers do parts of jobs that would have been the specialty of several different people before, say, the 1980s. And not only that: they switch between those, and aspects of their own job, much faster than before.

A person who had two kinds of tasks to worry about in a given day in 1975, might have twenty today—technology didn't so much eliminate work, as allow it to be more concentrated. Someone's still doing the work, it's just five people instead of twenty-five, and none of them as is focused or specialized as before. Everyone's a secretary now, in other words—plus whatever else they do. Everyone is the mail room. Little bits of jobs like project management or plain ol' management get devolved down to ordinary workers. And so on.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#119

Post by chasd00 »

mrweasel wrote: post #49

Soooo how to we get it back?

You just pay attention longer. It takes effort but that's all you really need to do. For example, go observe and pay attention to a plant for 45min. Think of it like a workout, it's uncomfortable and a PITA but that's all there is to it.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#120

Post by karaterobot »

Tenoke wrote: post #89
bizzleDawg wrote: post #21

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…

It would be nice if HN titles actually had to match submission titles.

Disagree. Article titles on the web are often very bad. Often this is for clickbait reasons, but also frequently just because the author was not writing for the HN front page as their audience. Almost always, I prefer the rewritten headlines on HN. However, this seems labor intensive to accomplish, and there is usually a delay before the edited title appears. What I wish is for article submitters to consider the use case, and rewrite the headline to conform to HN guidelines on submission.
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