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Have attention spans been declining?

slimemoldtimemold.com

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#131

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.

I struggled with C&P and Brothers Karamazov. On a 9 hour flight without wifi, I only got 100 pages in to the latter.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#132
post #113
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see recipes Tiktoks get readily debunked in longer-form content, such as by channels like "How To Cook That"¹; the Tiktoks amount to little more than content farming. What real information might be present is drowned out by fakes and bad advice that exist for no other reason than to soak up eyeballs.

I get far more out of longer-form videos, IMO.

(And yes, the bloated recipe blogspam is also a form that is rapidly approaching 0 bytes of information per byte transferred.)

¹(even this is "cheap" content, IMO; debunking stuff leaves the viewer back where they started, although How To Cook That specifically will occasionally show the "no, here's how you actually do this, and it takes less time than the tiktok's "time saver"." There's an endless stream of junk to debunk, so you don't really have to worry about running out, per se.)

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#133

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?

> I guess the question is not has attention spans declined, I think pretty much everyone can say yes.

What evidence do you base that belief on?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#134
post #98

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?

Not GP here, but I've gone through a similar brain reset exercise recently. There's no good way to do it, because it's essentially just dopamine deprivation. Caffeine withdrawal, internet withdrawal, gaming withdrawal - whatever stimulus you're using, you take it away and suffer for a while.

Quitting my corporate gig has also been massively helpful - our big tech overlords were committing Guantanamo level atrocities on our minds via Slack overload, and I will never return to that kind of environment. I'm barely exaggerating.

If you're a podcast kind of learner, Huberman has an episode on this "dopamine fasting" concept.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#135

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.

Relatedly, I've found my life-long "sleep problems" go away very fast if I stop using electronics or electric lights after sundown.

Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a button like you're living in a World's Fair crossed with Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired as early as you do if you don't do those things. Live like it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd have guessed?

Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working adults who need to Get Shit Done at night and zero other people you know are living on that kind of schedule—plus, Winter nights are way too long—but it worked. Sun goes down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by—and you'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and fast, time to go to bed.

Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with, while I was trying it.

Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another perspective on ordinary modern life.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#136

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

Thanks, didn't know. This article seems to have been written by a reader though so not the same authors of the sketchy lithium work

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#139

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…

The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.

I don't know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time. It's a very strong correlation.

(And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we're accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don't have time to adequately question is high).

Developing some skills requires focus and careful study. We're robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#140

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 tec…

Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was 75,000. [2]. "The Old Man and the Sea" was published in Life magazine, with a circulation of millions.[3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication...

[1]: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/....

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Backgr...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Backgr...

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