Too long; didn't read.
Have attention spans been declining?
331–340 of 495 posts
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
"Two pitbulls attack girl returning home from school"
Wow, they grow up so fast!
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
If you cook often, you can usually infer the details. The same is true for recipe sites and books, but at a different level of detail.
Usually when I use a tiktok cooking video, I'm not really "following" it, but just using it to get a general idea then riffing on it.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#334Earlier 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.
“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…
With how much the weather has messed with me lately, it seems that weather predictions mean all of these at once.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't personally see that. What you're saying to me, feels like an interpretation of what you think mindfulness is. Which is perfectly valid, it's just I've never personally associated mindfulness with any of the things you describe.
> I've never personally associated mindfulness with any of the things you describe What is mindfulness, to you? What sorts of practices and contexts do you experience as mindfulness?
For me mindfulness is about being present and aware of myself (including my sensations, thoughts etc.) and my surroundings (arguably the same thing as myself, since we are the ones perceiving) in the present moment.
I genuinely don't go beyond that. Otherwise it overcomplicates itself, which is also when you then to lose it in the long term.
Being aware is the action. It's not a particularly complicated thing, in 99% of contexts it's about looking at things through a curious lens. Paying attention. Observing, without judging.
From an implementation point of view, I evaluate myself based on how mindful I managed to be during specific moments/activities during the day i.e. brushing my teeth, working etc.
I think where a lot of people go wrong is that they continue to evaluate their day based on what they achieved or what goals were met. That's one of the quickest ways to dissolve mindfulness and forget about it entirely.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#336Earlier 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…
Attention span overflow. ;)
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#337The answer has been staring us in the face: https://imgur.com/TAocWp4
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
11. The betting pool amongst meteorologists has 3:1 odds for rain.
4:1 I know what you did here. I am taking my Mg/K supplements to keep up my attention.
Why is it 4:1 instead of 3:1?
3:1 means that you bet $1 four times on the 25%, lose money three times and make back $3 the last time.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#339There 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 appreciate your optimism. A lot of people point out that education hasn't changed meaningfully in hundreds of years. Professors, long lectures, textbook readings, homework and exams. I am curious if this trend will be the catalyst for a new education systems to topple current status quo. You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding re…
> You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory.
This happened a while ago and the solution to that was specialization and not tiktokization. As much as I am for modernizing, uhm, everything, I'm not sure I see an advantage in the current trend that's happening right now.
Quality have been declining on the software side, but that's only because I am exposed to that as a software developer. Everyday items quality are on the decline too (my Nike -will be the last ones- shoes have deteriorated in the interval of 3 months, just ridiculous).
So here we have it: a combination of short-span attentions, a system that rewards the short-term and a political class that does not care. It's a mystery how our societies have not collapsed yet. Or maybe we are close?
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#340Earlier 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.
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.
Well, yeah, blogs are not academic journals. And if a blog post disagrees with academic consensus, the academic consensus will be right the vast majority of the time. But this applies to all blogs on the internet, not only those on LessWrong.