391–400 of 495 posts
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> Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min. I’ve read somewhere that blockbuster movies are trending longer at the moment, because people are ever less willing to pay the high prices for cinema tickets, drinks and snacks, so movie studios need to offer a really big experience to make it seem worthwhile.
I bought a projector and a popcorn machine, haven't been to the movies since.
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…
Engineers can choose to have some flexibility, however the managers and upper managers have no breaks, and it kind of sucks for them to zoom in and out of contexts between meetings, and it often makes them lose track of things. If workload is not shared, it very quickly becomes a shitshow altogether. All my managers in my last 3 companies were struggling to keep up with what was going on, and had no rest; they would get pinged about issues even while they were on PTO which seemed inevitable.
Other high context-switching jobs may be those of doctors, stock brokers and analysts (they have to keep tracking a million things every day), lawyers, and sales guys. They come with their own way of causing mental overload quite frequently unfortunately.
Honestly I feel it's the circumstances some of which are in our control that can be adjusted to minimize distractions and remove some of the useless things that we think are not needed at all. It's no wonder that those "distraction elimination" browser plugins and mobile phone apps are a real thing!
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> In my opinion, our attention mechanism is very weak compared to the demands of academic study and modern knowledge work. Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok. Maybe the UX of a traditional science paper has to be reviewed instead of trying…
> Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok. Some things take time. You don't perfect a painting technique, explore a family of variations in a musical theme, analyze a complicated social issue, or solve non-trivial equations in a 25 second slice.…
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You can listen and understand faster than you can read and understand? I am far quicker at reading than listening.
Some people are visual learners. Some people are auditory learners.
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 think every single SEO content farm, and food receipy blog, would disagree with that.
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 un…
I tend to politely disagree with that. In most cases "comprehensive history of the subject" is important to understand the subject fully and, most importantly, reasons for the argument.
Currently we have endemic of people who suggest doing thing in particular way, but when you question reasoning, there will be no answer. It's picking up ideas here and there without understanding of premises, and it's very dangerous because idea without premises is likely inapplicable to slightly changed premises.
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…
>> informational content that can be compressed does get compressed I think every single SEO content farm, and food receipy blog, would disagree with that.
I'd wager low quality/unoptimised content suffers from data decay much faster than concise, correct content
This may be part of the reason Google presenting irrelevant SEO drivel all the more infuriating for users
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> when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action. I keep hearing this but is there actual evidence? My anecdata is that I can watch tiktoks and read programming books all day without one impacting the other. I honestly have trouble believing that our attention mechanism is so flawed it can be broken so easily. I think…
What kind of knowledge are all you getting from Tiktok? Technical knowledge? Philosophical? I thought the app was for lip syncing + lazy cheerleading and the occasional Chinese data mining. But I am perfectly happy hopping on the bandwagon if it has substance!
TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyethier/video/71989368081330209...
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWcirHIwVo
No idea what the deal is, but I'm guessing the YouTube algorithm is optimized for longer form videos so a lot of stuff ends up with just a lot of filler. The TikTok video is everything in the YouTube video, but with all the fluff removed. I've also used TikTok for foreign language lessons with excellent results, largely for the same reason. The videos tend to have a lot better information density than what YouTube optimizes for.
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Also, just watching that YouTube version again. Perhaps one of the best things is no more "If you like this video be sure to like, subscribe, and comment below. It really helps the channel out." An algorithm that relies on such a stupid, gameable, opt-in metric is always going to be inherently dysfunctional.