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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#431

Post by nottorp »

nunez wrote: post #316
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 cle…

> The hour long video on a thing that covered most of the bases and edge cases gets cut down

... and you've already forgotten about the book with actual in depth info.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#432

Post by Zetice »

cubefox wrote: post #315
Zetice wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because you said “no”, and I only said one thing. Do you take that back?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#433

Post by Zetice »

cubefox wrote: post #322
Zetice wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36852187

Wrong submission about attention.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#434

Post by hanselot »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #428
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…

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 spe…

Well, I can't give you a neurological point of view on it, but if you train an LLM to be great at handling a context size of 512 tokens, when you try to ask it to do a task which requires greater context length (or in this context - attention span), the responses become incoherent, scattered and perplex as hell.

Which I imagine to be what would happen to a human if they trained their brain to process information of a certain context length exclusively.

So yeah, perhaps your brain becomes amazing at processing succinct information that's been engineered to be short, to the point and has none of the subtext or subtlety that you could include in a larger context.

That being said, perhaps that's exactly the kind of mental capacity you need for high context switching professions, I'm not sure which those are yet, but I'm sure there has to be someone in the world that has a use for that.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#435

Post by Zetice »

axiomaticdoubts wrote: post #341
Zetice wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not just bloggers. There are computer scientists with publications in top CS conferences that post on LW. For example, Alexander Turner, Dan Hendrycks, Paul Christiano, and Jacob Steinhardt all post there.

Then the question you should be asking is why choose to post on LW when the value of publishing a paper is substantially higher.

Perhaps because what they post doesn’t hold up to scrutiny from their peers, so they prefer to play in the mud with the folks who won’t notice the issues with their ideas.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#436

Post by duringwork12 »

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 use it to figure out AI image techniques. Basically the theory is in papers, the nearly accepted stuff is in blogs, but the people on cutting edge are in youtube and tiktok trying 100 things before they can post 1

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#437

Post by Zetice »

gruez wrote: post #323
Zetice wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This excerpt from the article on Scott Alexander on RationalWiki is the only thing I need to quote to make others understand the stakes here. >As usual, you can make anything worse by adding Reddit. /r/slatestarcodex is an unofficial fan forum for the blog. Scott comments occasionally and is a moderator. The culture wars (a regular weekly thread, until it was recently branched off to the Scott-endorsed /r/themotte) a…

I hope you don’t think invoking Reddit raises the stakes…

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#438

Post by MeltedVoltage »

idopmstuff wrote: post #292
nonethewiser wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rea…

But how would you judge the quality of 15 second videos? It's crucial to be able to push through that in order to make a good judgement if the content is any good. The inability to think and judge critically is a huge problem nowadays in my opinion.
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