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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#121

Post by fikama »

ceejayoz wrote: post #47
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…

> Whereas in the HN title it reads as if it's saying a "65% decline in attention span". Perhaps the submitter's attention span ran out.

I know that HN is maybe not a place for such comments, but I strongly belive we need to make "attention span overflow" a thing

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#122

Post by lotsofpulp »

colechristensen wrote: post #115
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 wo…

You can listen and understand faster than you can read and understand?

I am far quicker at reading than listening.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#123

Post by reacharavindh »

I think it is related but not the same - instant gratification is what leads to our brains to shorten the attention span. I could see it happen to me in the last few years. I sort of stagnated in almost every endeavor because I was picking low hanging fruits if you will and did only the things that I could easily see the end result for…

Until I started training for a half marathon. Not having run seriously in my life, I challenged myself to join my friends for a 10K last year. The training was an unexpected lesson in humility and thought - I could not go for the 10K regardless of how motivated or pumped up I was. I needed to train myself to get there properly… 2 KM on day 1, 5KM by day 15, and 10K by day 30 or so. With enough rest in between. I could do the 10K last year happily.

This year I am training for the 21K. I’m practicing for 3 months slowly improving my pace and endurance.

I’m not what one would call athletic. I’m still doing it and it makes me incredibly happy.

The analogy I went for is - the same applies to learning anything new, or mastering something- it takes time, and continuous effort. Not instant gratification. It sounds very logical and simple in hindsight, but I had to learn it as an adult now.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#124

Post by wizzwizz4 »

eastof wrote: post #98
fragmede wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lord of the Rings. An absolutely genre-defining work, but if you read it, it's really friggin slow and not at all compatible with today's attention spans. It's not a demand for quality , it's a demand to be endlessly entertained without having to invest the time or have the patience to wait for a backstory to unfold. Which is fine, I'm opening my phone to doom scroll for a second too, I just don't think it's quality…

Any tips for this retraining?

Don't rush to retrain yourself: consider whether things are enjoyable, or just engaging, and give it time.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#125

Post by tayo42 »

fragmede wrote: post #74
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #40

I like the theory that the reason attention span has declined is because the demand for quality has hugely increased. Since there are so many blogs, films, books and videos out there, we no longer want to waste time on things that don't entertain or provide value to us. If in the past you might've given in and read or watched through boring parts because there was less options available, now people demand less B.S. a…

Lord of the Rings. An absolutely genre-defining work, but if you read it, it's really friggin slow and not at all compatible with today's attention spans. It's not a demand for quality , it's a demand to be endlessly entertained without having to invest the time or have the patience to wait for a backstory to unfold. Which is fine, I'm opening my phone to doom scroll for a second too, I just don't think it's quality…

It's like an 80 year old book written with an archaic style of English. It wasn't even popular when it came out.

Most media from the 1930s to 50s isn't popular anymore. Taste move on. Idk if you can simplify this to attention spans.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#126

Post by deadbeeves »

fragmede wrote: post #74
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #40

I like the theory that the reason attention span has declined is because the demand for quality has hugely increased. Since there are so many blogs, films, books and videos out there, we no longer want to waste time on things that don't entertain or provide value to us. If in the past you might've given in and read or watched through boring parts because there was less options available, now people demand less B.S. a…

Lord of the Rings. An absolutely genre-defining work, but if you read it, it's really friggin slow and not at all compatible with today's attention spans. It's not a demand for quality , it's a demand to be endlessly entertained without having to invest the time or have the patience to wait for a backstory to unfold. Which is fine, I'm opening my phone to doom scroll for a second too, I just don't think it's quality…

I think it's more a matter of investment vs. payoff. I read TLotR from beginning to end once and I liked it, but it's such a time sink for so little payoff that I wouldn't do it again. There's so much else I could do with that time instead. I'd rather put the movies in the background while I do something else over the course of nine hours, or maybe reread a specific bit I liked. It's not about instant gratification, it's that we're no longer constrained in our media selection. 70 years ago you might have reread the books right after finishing them because you had nothing else to do. That's not true today.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#127

Post by notahacker »

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…

The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today

I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#128

Post by the_only_law »

fragmede wrote: post #74
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #40

I like the theory that the reason attention span has declined is because the demand for quality has hugely increased. Since there are so many blogs, films, books and videos out there, we no longer want to waste time on things that don't entertain or provide value to us. If in the past you might've given in and read or watched through boring parts because there was less options available, now people demand less B.S. a…

Lord of the Rings. An absolutely genre-defining work, but if you read it, it's really friggin slow and not at all compatible with today's attention spans. It's not a demand for quality , it's a demand to be endlessly entertained without having to invest the time or have the patience to wait for a backstory to unfold. Which is fine, I'm opening my phone to doom scroll for a second too, I just don't think it's quality…

I never read lord of the rings. I read the hobbit though.

The Tolkien work I struggled with was The Silmarillion. I understand it’s not much like the others and was a posthumous publication, but middle school me struggled to stay interested enough with the way it was structured.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#129

Post by dubcanada »

wheelerof4te wrote: post #103
dubcanada wrote: post #81

I guess the question is not has attention spans declined, I think pretty much everyone can say yes. I suppose the question is, does it matter?

That heavily depends on the context. Is your child having difficulty staying alert in the classroom? Then the answer is yes. Are you having difficulty understanding a bestseller book? No worries there, just watch a movie or something.

Do you think children should be in a classroom? I tend to believe that children should be outside personally, with very little indoor activity. Even if it's snowing. I learned way more by doing my own thing, what ever that is, then I ever did stuck inside of a class room having a teacher read word for word from a textbook.

I think there are varieties in the aspect of learning to be considered, some don't learn the same way of others. And that should be considered as well.

But generally I don't think attention spans have anything to do with classroom. People were not paying attention in classrooms WAY before cell phones were invented. The problem is the "room" part of a classroom in my opinion.

Reading I do agree with though.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#130

Post by niplav »

blueblimp wrote: post #97

For those who aren't aware, this blog is infamous for sloppy work. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

This is a submission to a [contest](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/01/mysterious-mysterie...) SMTM are running, so the author is very likely not the normal authors of SMTM.
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