I don't know if they have or not, but I just spent the last few minutes reading about the neologism ephebiphobia and feeling vaguely annoyed by the assumptions and general tone of the wikipedia article. Now I'm closing this tab and going to get a burrito.
Have attention spans been declining?
191–200 of 495 posts
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#192Love people implying their beliefs are empirical by arbitrarily assigning percentage values.
I think this is just an unusual attempt to formulate their guesses more precisely without relying on linguistics. You could see it as somewhat earnest, as in they can be shown to wrong to a certain extent, and can't try to weasel out of their specific claims. In this kind of meta study without a quantitative result, I think it conveys the intention rather well.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Though reading is more efficient, perhaps they just have more time to listen to audiobooks to the point it is more total information gathered. Multi-tasking for the win!
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like it would be a better movie split into 2 or 3 sittings.
3 hours is probably getting towards the upper limit but it's hardly historically anomalous. Lawrence of Arabia was over 3 1/2 hours and other "epics" of that era were often in the 3+ hour range. (Though movie theaters often had intermissions which most would probably never do today.) Live theater (with an intermission) is often in that range as well although many newer plays seem to be more like straight through 90 m…
Definitely with the intermissions. But I really mean that I often like to stop a long movie, think about it awhile, and then come back to it later. This is how short TV series work, for example. This is also how books work, by their nature. It's a kind of "intellectual digestion" - an intermission is good, but a night's sleep is even better.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#195There 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?
2022: “Thanks viewing my part 1 of 9 introductory video on how to master regex….”
2023: “GPT make regex to remove white space”
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#196I 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 .
ADHD numbers have doubled because people like drugs that make them productive, and the victimhood points you get for being "neurodivergent" ... aka, its all fake.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#197Earlier 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…
Was this a joke? The mega sentence would seem to be perfect example of your point.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#198Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#199I'm surprised no one here has mentioned mindfulness (is briefly mentioned in the article).
It pretty much solves this problem.
But I guess that's part of the issue, is that the problem directly obfuscates the solution, so the problem remains prevalent.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#200My attention span is too low to read the article. Can someone summarize it?
The author tries to find specific evidence to answer whether individual people overall had their attention span reduced, in the time period where internet + social media became widespread. They go to some effort to define terms and review existing literature.
They do not end up with a specific way to test for attention span, and they do not find definitive answers in existing literature. However, every thing, even if somewhat flawed, points to some forms of reduced attention spans.
More interestingly, each element of the question is kinda questioned and widened during the article (“is there such a thing as attention span?”, “is each measure of shorter time spent on an activity actually a measure of shorter attention span?”)
Imo what the intro touches on but fails to be explored in sufficient detail is what role gratification plays. I think so much time is spent on quantifying existing results, that when trying to design a good new test not enough time is spent applying game theory. I feel like there could be some good ways to properly quantify the link between gratification and attention, but I don't have the game theory / psychology bagage to go any further.