Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Have attention spans been declining?

slimemoldtimemold.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 495 posts

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#311

Post by rwhitman »

Eumenes wrote: post #260
ImaCake wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fool’s opinion. Spend some time reading what people diagnosed with ADHD say about their disorder. Medication merely makes them able to keep up some of the time.

I've heard and met many - its just hearsay to me. Fools believe hearsay. Until there's some advanced blood test or biological marker, the diagnosis is complex social engineering or at best, pseudoscience.

Here's some reading material for you, from reputable sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894421/ https://news.mit.edu/2014/inside-adult-adhd-brain-0610

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#312

Post by nunez »

This article was incredibly interesting to me given the chain of events that have unfolded at Reddit.

I used to be a hardcore Reddit user. On the site daily for ten years or so. While I didn't spend hours on the site per day (though there were some days where I definitely did), I _had_ to visit it every day or I would be irritable.

Note that I felt like this despite unsubscribing to every subreddit in favor of multireddits (so that my front page would be empty), not enabling notifications on the site, disabling infinite scroll and having a very limited set of subs in my multis, few of which I'd consider classic time-wasters (like /r/consulting, which is mostly consulting memes, or /r/programmerhumor).

A problem with Reddit (for me) is that despite doing all of this, there is essentially infinite content, and all of it is interesting!

Since I also browsed Hacker News, what ultimately happened was that I would speed-run HN and Reddit in an attempt to be "caught up" during the "limited free time" I had to myself.

Like many here, I quit Reddit cold-turkey a month ago when Reddit committed to their new API pricing strategy and Christian committed to sunsetting Apollo. I figured that it was only a matter of time until Reddit sunsets old.reddit, I had no interest in being forced to use new.reddit, and all of the subs I cared about were (rightfully!) going dark and losing subscribers in the process.

Since I browse Hacker News via skimfeed.com (excellent curator) and there are, at most, 15 posts on there at a time, I don't spend nearly as much time on "Internet things" as I did before. However, my tolerance for reading (and writing!) long form like this has gone way up! I think this is due to me not feeling as if I need to split my time as aggressively as I did before.

I'm also much more chill about "needing" to browse daily. I still hit up HN every day, but because there is so little to catch up on, I feel like I got much more of my time back now.

(One more thing. Reddit, by and large, rewards short, quippy, knee-jerk responses. Longform is typically skipped over. You don't have to think very much to use the site. Ironically, it is very easy to scroll through a Reddit thread while also feeling rushed to speed-run through it to get caught up.

Very different from HN, where the content is very interesting, and longer comments tend to be upvoted more.)

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#313

Post by pwpw »

BirdieNZ wrote: post #298
pwpw wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

> There's no form of society in which ADHD is an advantage

> 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.

Your experience is totally valid! I can only speak for my own experience, but I find compared to my neurotypical peers, I am much more capable at learning a breadth of topics. My peers are significantly better at performing 40 three-way matches for invoices in a work day while I would totally fail at that. But let me make my own video game where I have to learn how to program it, design art, and create music, and I’m great at that! My power comes from the ability to bounce around things depending on what I want to focus on that day. I create an environment for myself where I have dozens of tasks I can do, so that I always have something that will grab my interest.

The way this usually plays out in the actual working world is that I struggle with boring, repetitive tasks, but now that my boss knows how I work, he has let me set a more friendly set up and now frequently sees me deliver major changes that would have taken another developer weeks to accomplish given the diversity of tasks I have solved. Meanwhile the other developer is delivering on certain types of tasks I would be much worse at accomplishing. Our team plays to our strengths.

I’m great at deeply learning various concepts then hyperfocusing and delivering significant code changes at work. Some days I’ll complete 3 major jira tickets complete with testing because I’m so focused. Now of course there are other days where it’s much harder to get things done. But setting up that environment where I have diverse things to work on lets that aspect of my ADHD shine.

I will note that I’m properly medicated and have a great diet that helped a lot. School was always really tough for me. Then I discovered when I was studying for the CPA exam, that I learn much better from books than from a teacher in a classroom. I experienced this again when I self-taught CS. These days, I view my ADHD as less of a hindrance and more of a different approach. It’s true that it has downsides compared to a neurotypical, but I feel that it absolutely has its upsides as well when in a healthy state.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#314

Post by janalsncm »

cubefox wrote: post #256
Zetice wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Safety issues" are to him more like, "the AI will kill everyone to fill its objectives" and less like, "deepfakes are concerning." Though I'm sure he hopped on the "deepfakes are bad" bandwagon at some point to further his time in the spotlight.

> "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…

None of those people you mentioned share Yudkowsky’s conclusion that air strikes against data centers are warranted.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#315

Post by cubefox »

Zetice wrote: post #293
cubefox wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, I don't, why do you think that?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#316

Post by nunez »

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…

Yeah, but compression is lossy.

The hour long video on a thing that covered most of the bases and edge cases gets cut down into a 30 minute (likely 15 minute) YT video with important information missing.

The 15 min YouTube video turns into two 30 second TikToks that speed run through 70% of what you need to know, sure, but is the 30% they didn't cover (or know about!) actually important? Who knows!

Example: I was cleaning our jacuzzi bath tub the other day. The previous owners had never cleaned it, so black gunk came out of the jets.

A YouTube video (that was actually a TikTok!) suggested unscrewing the jet nozzles (amongst other things), which she demonstrated as a really simple "just unscrew them" sort of deal.

As it happens, not every jet nozzle is meant to be removed! And not every jet nozzle should be removed! Also, it is really hard to get replacement nozzles after you crack one because it was affixed to the housing!

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#317

Post by nunez »

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.

That still happens today. Gotta have enough filler to publish!

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#318

Post by cubefox »

h2odragon wrote: post #308
cubefox wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Quantum Computing" is a cult with commercial interests / investor scams. I'm even more cynical about the economists.

Scott Aaronson has often called out inflated claims by quantum computer startups.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#319

Post by nunez »

cwkoss wrote: post #113
abyssin wrote: 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.

Almost all of those sites have a Jump to Recipe button though, and TikTok recipe videos often miss a lot of important details...

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#320

Post by janalsncm »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #282

Another commenter mentioned that modern humans are exposed to more content, and necessarily we must apply filters. I would go further to suggest that not only is there more content, but that content is expressed in a manner intended to only consume a brief amount of attention. Typically, such content is also presented in a way that encourages the user to continue providing their attention, except that their attention…

I find a lot of content online (videos and blogs) as well as offline (various books) are too long to the point of being disrespectful of my time.

If you’re writing a blog and incentivized to stuff in as many SEO terms as possible, you will do so at the expense of my time and irritation.

If you need to make a 10 minute video but really only have 2 minutes of content, you value those 8 minutes of my life at zero and unless I do to, I’m skipping through the filler.

Same thing with books. If your book contains one central argument, respect your reader enough to cut out the fat. I don’t need a comprehensive history of the subject if your argument can boil down to a few paragraphs.

Post reply on HN