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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#181

Post by episiarch »

n0on3 wrote: post #169
fikama wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

(I'm not sure if you were joking or not and I know it's probably not in the same spirit you intended it here / a bit OT but...) I've been using literally that exact expression for a while to describe the situation in which, during somewhat complex discussions within a group, in order to not be perceived as jerks participants are forced to follow an unnecessarily long, repetitive, trivial and most often also completel…

I didn't even have the attention span to unpack your first sentence.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#183

Post by ThrowAway1922A »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #100
skilled wrote: post #22

People hack themselves to find the quickest release of feel-good chemicals in their brain but most do it at the expense of not realizing that it numbs their entire existence. And now it’s more prevalent than it ever has been. Grabbing a phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you have built around yourself and pretend like you have control over your life, but no one has control over their lives. The more you bu…

Many people's lives are not that good, there are many people with bad jobs they hate, or partners they can't stand. It's easy to imagine why humans act this way. What makes you think your life is so much better?

Your comment resonates a lot, at least with me. I don't enjoy my life, any distraction I can get and any negative interaction I can block is a positive for me.

I don't care if someone finds it problematic or pathetic, at the end of the day I just need to get through the day, something that sometimes is really, really difficult.

I really don't care for extremely judgmental people like the one you replied to, they either don't get it, or somehow figured our different ways to cope and consider themselves far superior to the rest of us.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#184

Post by ghaff »

deadbeeves wrote: post #126
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…

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,…

The Return of the King is particular has a real structure problem. Multiple endings after the actual ending. And then really the final wrapup/epilogue is in the Appendix. The movie tried to clean a lot of this up--most controversially by axing the scouring of the shire--but still didn't wholly succeed.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#185

Post by wheelerof4te »

dubcanada wrote: post #129
wheelerof4te wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

"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."

And I learned a lot more by reading stuff from Wikipedia on my own pace than I learned reading textbooks. So, good point.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#186

Post by yamazakiwi »

skilled wrote: post #167
yamazakiwi wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your plan is to spend the rest of your life feeling sorry for yourself? You are the only one feeling sorry for other people in this conversation. Even people with what would be generally considered great lives chase dopamine. Believe whatever narrative you need to, but in general this behavior is not that deep or problematic vs an actual drug addiction or real problems. It seems you have an axe to grind with anythin…

[flagged]

You are implying that my argument isn't from experience when it is. My argument is that you are biased and projecting your own self-control problems on others and treating your solution as a universal truth to be learned. You are also conflating people looking at their phones to your previous drug addiction.

>And please don't use what a person has said

Ok, I'll remember to not include any topics or details anyone ever brings up in conversation. I don't think any more or less of you based on your past you mentioned. I'm just attributing it to your bias.

Criticism is not disrespectful. I should probably stop replying to your messages however, this is going somewhere unhelpful so I apologize for that.

All this being said, if your disdain for that behavior keeps you personally away from bad behavior, I could see how promoting that strategy internally and externally is important to you. Disdain can be a useful tool.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#187

Post by axiomaticdoubts »

niplav wrote: post #130
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.

I still think it's important to note that the blog's work is shoddy. The fact that this blog post is #1 on HN means that multiple people will read SMTM's other blog posts, which contain several falsehoods that they've refused to fix.

See, for example, this page https://manifold.markets/Natalia/how-many-of-these-falsemisl... for an incomplete list. I have been trying to get them to remove falsehoods from their blog for over one year, but it's impossible.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#188

Post by civilitty »

notahacker wrote: post #88
ceejayoz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For related reasons, I like the blog's claim that much of the difficulty in establishing whether the proposition is true or not is because none of the wealth of literature on attention span was in the form of long term studies. Perhaps the researchers got bored and moved on to something else!

[flagged]

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#189

Post by User23 »

bamfly wrote: post #118
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 m…

Yes that's what "productivity gains" look like.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#190

Post by User23 »

kristjank wrote: post #90

I feel increasing frustration every time I see a graph with a clear upward trend being waved off as "probably just better awareness". I am even more frustrated when it's a graph tracking some mental health issue. If adult ADHD numbers have doubled, that should mean something .

Cynically, I'd say it means that if you want to make staff Adderall is going to give you a considerable advantage over the next guy, all else being equal. Anyone smart enough to be in the running for staff or higher is smart enough to google ADHD symptoms and present with them at a psychiatrist.
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