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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#291

Post by cubefox »

Zetice wrote: post #287
cubefox wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Safety issues" are to him more like, "the AI will kill everyone to fill its objectives" Yes, and he was way ahead of the curve here, since similar positions got a lot more mainstream in the past years and months. E.g. two of three AI Turing award winners (Hinton and Bengio) now say that superintelligent AI poses a serious extinction risk. OpenAI has also identified the alignment problem as a major issue. Even form…

So in other words, people who've spent their entire lives thinking and talking about AI praise other people who also have spent their entire lives thinking and talking about AI. This is a bubble conversation that makes no sense to people outside of that bubble, and for good reason; it doesn't matter outside of that bubble.

No, AI experts which formerly were skeptical of an outsider's (Yudkowsky's) opinion, now changed their mind about it.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#292

Post by idopmstuff »

nonethewiser wrote: post #176
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…

> There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more. Attention span cannot be measured by what we don’t pay attention to. And there has always - always - been more information than anyone could process. I think it quite obviously is determined by how long we pay attention to things we chose to engage with. Clearly watching 15 second short clips instead of readi…

> Clearly watching 15 second short clips instead of reading books has had a detrimental effect.

This isn't clear and very much depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Want to get deeply engrossed in fiction? Sure. On the other hand, I'm currently reading a book about sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old, and it's way too long - just jam packed with repetition and fluff that doesn't help at all. There's really a few critical pieces of information that you need to understand in order to sleep train your baby, and then a few more secondary pieces of information that are interesting/useful context around why sleep training works and the studies that support the methods in the book.

Particularly since I have a four month old baby and thus very little free time, 15 second videos/blog posts/whatever other short form content on this topic would clearly be superior to reading the book.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#293

Post by Zetice »

cubefox wrote: post #291
Zetice wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words, people who've spent their entire lives thinking and talking about AI praise other people who also have spent their entire lives thinking and talking about AI. This is a bubble conversation that makes no sense to people outside of that bubble, and for good reason; it doesn't matter outside of that bubble.

No, AI experts which formerly were skeptical of an outsider's (Yudkowsky's) opinion, now changed their mind about it.

Wait, so you deny the fact that Hinton and Bengio have worked on AI their entire careers?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#294

Post by sixQuarks »

jgtrosh wrote: post #200
sixQuarks wrote: post #59

My 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…

Can someone summarize the above comment, attention span still too low to digest in one go

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#295

Post by inopinatus »

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.

“75% chance of rain”:

1. It will definitely rain, on 75% of the relevant area.

2. It will definitely rain, for 75% of the relevant time period.

3. It will rain with an intensity of 75% of the maximum our instruments can measure.

4. Three out of four meteorologists think it will rain.

5. It will rain on 75% of the population.

6. It will rain on everyone, but 75% of the population forgot their umbrella.

7. It will rai

8. 25% chance of dry.

9. 25% chance of snow.

10. When you become trapped in a Groundhog Day-type loop and are forced to repeat today three more times, then a subsequent analysis will show that it rained on exactly three of the four total days. Probably.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#296

Post by cubefox »

Zetice wrote: post #289
cubefox wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LessWrong is obviously not a cult, the allegations are nonsense. Well established researchers post there (e.g. Paul Christiano) and some even work or worked for OpenAI or DeepMind (e.g. Richard Ngo). It's rather that the cited source "RationalWiki" is a highly politically biased source which routinely attacks anything which is in any way associated with the rationalism community, or which engages with things that are…

[flagged]

Well, Aaronson is also a leading quantum computing researcher, and Alexander is read by respected scholars, such as the psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, or the economist Bryan Caplan.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#297

Post by sixQuarks »

doublerabbit wrote: post #87
sixQuarks wrote: post #59

My attention span is too low to read the article. Can someone summarize it?

I would, but laziness is on the increase and it's too much effort to type.

I was going to write a comment trying to motivate you to not be lazy, but procrastination is also up and I’ll just do it later.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#298

Post by BirdieNZ »

pwpw wrote: post #230
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #112

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…

> 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. You’re completely misrepresenting ADHD, so I don’t see how this anecdote proves your point. ADHD isn’t the inability to focus. In fact, it often comes with the ability to hyperfocus better…

> society is largely set up to favor neurotypicals at the expense of those with ADHD.

As someone with diagnosed ADHD, I think this misrepresents ADHD. There's no form of society in which ADHD is an advantage; in a hunter-gatherer society, my tent would still be untidy and I'd still procrastinate fixing my spear before the hunt until the day before, and I'd still lose focus during the hunt and miss the deer walking past, because I was watching ants move sticks around.

ADHD is a disability, not a difference of ability. It's not very enjoyable for me to accept as I'm reasonably bright, but I'm mentally disabled in a way that someone of equivalent intelligence without ADHD is not. They can more easily achieve what they want in life than I can. I don't think there's any task in which someone with ADHD is more suited to than someone without; there are tasks which are less difficult for the person with ADHD than other tasks, but ADHD doesn't bestow many, if any, advantages over a neurotypical person.

There was a recent brief blog post[1] on this from Scott Alexander, if you're curious to read more, but I've come to the same conclusion independently.

[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-mode...

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#299

Post by Zetice »

cubefox wrote: post #296
Zetice wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Well, Aaronson is also a leading quantum computing researcher, and Alexander is read by respected scholars, such as the psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, or the economist Bryan Caplan.

So? That means nothing as to the quality or even topic of their blog content.

Unless blogs started receiving peer review while I wasn't paying attention, there's likely a reason any given content lives there and not in an academic paper.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#300

Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

idopmstuff wrote: post #290
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…

I'm reading a book on sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old, I think, and it's like 75% unnecessary. I attribute it to the fact that when it was out, there were fewer books/other media competing for attention, plus it wasn't easy to go find additional information by Googling, so people attributed value to extra, borderline-useless info in books.

"sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old" this book sounds hilarious
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