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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#421

Post by bigbluesax »

somenameforme wrote: post #372
Brusco_RF wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One thing has changed dramatically in education over just the past 100 years. This [1] is an entrance exam for Harvard in 1869. It was expected that the applicant would be fluent in Greek, Latin, English, that they would have a exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world, be able to carry out complex mathematical calculations, compose geometric proofs, and more. That trend also was the same as…

I studied quite a bit of latin in high school (not in the USA through) and I have to say I'm not overly impressed by the test. It certainly doesn't test for fluency in Latin or Greek, most of the exercises are purely about grammar. The exercises that do require translation skills, don't require any vocabulary either. The sentences themselves are quite long, but latin grammar lends itself to complex run-on-sentences. I think the better students in my class would have done quite well on this test even through latin wasn't one of their main subjects.

The Greek portion seems fairly similar if not a bit easier.

Every single history question is about ancient Rome or Greece. Every single geography question is about the location of rivers. How does this constitute an "exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world"?

The maths section does seem to have some difficult parts, we didn't do any proofs in the regular high school curriculum for example. The other math sections just show how much the requirements have shifted, a lot of the exercises in the arithmatic section got replaced by calculators, but I don't see any calculus on this test.

Looking at this, I think today's Harvard students are more educated overall than the ones in 1869. Our priorities just shifted.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#422

Post by Joeri »

rjzzleep wrote: post #347
mlyle wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side is that 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 don't know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time. It's a very strong correlation. (And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us wh…

TL;DR if we keep the direct environment of our child clean and limit distractions she's calm, and focused. If we don't she gets whiny and somewhat unbearable. I'm raising a child right now and it's pretty simple to observe a few simple patterns: 1. if there is stuff in her visible range during any activity that is even mildly interesting she wants it and it distracts from any activity. be it her own scooter, or her o…

Regarding your point 5. Gifts are a slow form of cluttering that snuck up on me. Children have multiple occasions per year where they are expected to get gifts, often more than one from more than one individual, which leads to sometimes dozens of gifts per child per year, most of which they rapidly lose interest in, added to an ever growing pile. It is rude to throw away gifts once received, and donating comes with its own caveats and effort. Unless the gifts pile is actively and continuously curated it grows over time and clutters the house. By the time I realized what was happening, we had already lost the fight and old toys were everywhere.

We recently moved and used the occasion to declutter. We flipped the script and took only what we wanted: just the toys the kids still wanted, just the books worth keeping, just the clothes worth wearing, and so on. I would estimate we kept less than a quarter of the stuff in our old house. All that stuff clutters not just the house, but the mind as well.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#423

Post by debok »

tetha wrote: post #379
nunez wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cle…

Yeah. I got myself a songwriting course and it's certainly not compressed, more like 20 - 30 hours in total length. And those guys do a lot of, let's call it, meandering in the topics. Like, one of the basic topics was time signature and time signature notation. And the basics are somewhat simple indeed, but after a minute or two, there's a detour into why german Volksmusik is different about on- and off-beats, and l…

Yeah, I have the same experience with retention. The extra time spent on the detours helps to contextualise the theory. To expand on your flowers analogy, looking at the flowers helps to remember the path better.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#424

Post by wraptile »

panta wrote: post #412
wraptile wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> We got new information delivery methods that are significantly better and when going back to old methods we naturally get unsatisfied. Does that mean we are getting "dumber" as "attention deficit" memes imply or that certain fields are just failing to catch up? the new delivery methods are not significantly better at delivering knowledge, but at diverting attention. They are engineered for that outcome, not for the…

Hard disagree with you. New methods are objectively better. One obvious illustration is that online books/websites are better than paper books at information delivery and teaching people in general. The "society is degrading" meme is as old as time itself and frankly it's getting a bit boring.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#425

Post by crims0n »

renegade-otter wrote: post #420

Yes. Our brains have been rewired . We consume information in smaller bits - the brain can no longer focus on long-form content. I used to be able to read a chapter of a book - now I can't. That's NOT an accident, and I didn't somehow acquire ADHD at 40 (and I will argue that most people who are hogging Adderall right now didn't either).

Yeah I recently started reading again in my adult life (highly recommended btw), and I had to retrain my brain to sit through the slow drip of information. First a page, then a couple, finally a chapter.

One things that stood out to me is books are incredibly verbose. You wade through an ocean of verbiage on the given subject and saturate yourself with the knowledge - and in the end you come out far more of an expert than any internet perusing could allow.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#426

Post by kaba0 »

toomim wrote: post #288

My PhD thesis produced an instrument for measuring attention span: https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation.html It is a lot like the author theorized— it uses Mechanical Turk to measure how long people will attend to a task given an incentive. Anyone interested should be sure to check out this survival graph, that depicts the length of time people will attend to a task, given characteristics of the task and…

Is there even a definition of attention span? I was under the impression that it is an ill-defined term in the first place: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp

(Sorry, haven’t yet checked out your work)

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#427

Post by KineticLensman »

andirk wrote: post #360
wraptile wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I've come across lots of DIY tips, knots that I can now tie and Photoshop techniques. The algo now knows that I'll watch these.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#428

Post by throwaway2037 »

mlyle wrote: post #139
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…

The flip side is that 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 don't know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time. It's a very strong correlation. (And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us wh…

    The flip side is that 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 see this written so frequently. Is there any studies to back up this claim? Please forgive me: Normally, I abhor the "citation please" type of response, but this claim is misleading to me. It just sounds like grumpy old person complaining about speed of the world and young(er) people.

Example: I tried Googling for "does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?". None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing "it's never been worse" blog posts.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#429

Post by throwaway2037 »

sgath92 wrote: post #384
Terr_ wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my underlying thesis probably renders to something like: The idea that people in the past had personalities that valued the pursuit of perfection more-highly than now is often assumed, but seldom is good evidence given to support it. In many cases it may be explained by survivorship-bias or by applying inaccurate modern assumptions about the relative costs of different materials/labor and the prestige/rarity…

> The idea that people in the past had personalities that valued the pursuit of perfection more-highly than now is often assumed, but seldom is good evidence given to support it. I think its not hard to show that people have come to prioritize the low cost of goods/services at the cost of quality as a way of artificially propping up lifestyle habits as available disposable income goes down. An appliance like a refrig…

    hence the huge % of the population who has no real savings, little or no retirement investments, and will loose their home if they get a bad medical diagnosis
Was this not also true in earlier generations?

Also, most people from highly developed countries with sound social safety net (G7 and close friends) do not have such a doom-and-gloom outlook. I assume your view comes from the US.

    where even two adult fulltime earners can barely tread water
This is certainly not true in the vast majority of G7 and close friends -- only US.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#430

Post by rocho »

guerilla_prgrmr wrote: post #195
abyssin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

That's great if you don't want to understand what's going on under the hood, becoming the 2023 version of factory workers in Ford's assembly line.
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