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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#441

Post by maroonblazer »

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…

> Is there any studies to back up this claim?

Did you read TFA? It's the entire subject of the piece.

One could analogize attention as a muscle. If you're only lifting 5KG dumbbells, you're not going to be able to lift 25KG.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#443

Post by megablast »

gardenhedge wrote: post #201
cwkoss wrote: post #113

Earlier 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.

there's no way anyone just watches a 30s recipe clip one time and then goes and replicates the dish.

Yeah? If it is a variation on a recipe I know?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#444

Post by gruez »

Zetice wrote: post #437
gruez wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not trying to raise the stakes. I'm trying to point out the level of maturity at rationalwiki.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#445

Post by Zetice »

axiomaticdoubts wrote: post #340
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.

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.

The issue is that LW, more than most, is seemingly unaware of this fact.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#446

Post by schnitzelstoat »

allturtles wrote: post #140
notahacker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tec…

Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For…

Agatha Christie is one of the bestselling authors of all time and I know my grandparents used to read her books while growing up in the 30's and 40's.

Those books have pretty good prose, it's perhaps not on the level of complexity of Hemingway (I've never read Hemingway so I couldn't say myself) but it is pretty complicated so I think there's definitely something to the argument that entertainment has 'dumbed down'.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#447

Post by blackbear_ »

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…

Google is a terrible tool to find scientific research. Rather use Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) or some of the fancy new AI-assisted literature survey tools such as Elicit (https://elicit.org). I used both to find these result:

- The effect of daily internet usage on a short attention span and academic performance (https://monami.hs-mittweida.de/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId...)

- Enhancing Cognitive Performance in Children by Decreasing Screen Time and Increasing Art Activities (https://www.proquest.com/openview/8f41dc5ed9fff23842acf88b16...)

- Gen Z and Millennials in the Workplace: How are Leaders Adapting to their Short Attention Span and How Will they Keep them from Leaving a Qualitative Study (https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4800/)

- Does Media Use Have a Short-Term Impact on Cognitive Performance? (https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105%2Fa000038)

- Short-term mindfulness intervention reduces the negative attentional effects associated with heavy media multitasking (https://doi.org/10.1038/srep24542)

- Influence of Short Video Watching Behaviors on Visual Short-Term Memory (https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.314)

- Attention switching and working memory spans (https://doi.org/10.1080/09541440440000014)

- Caught in the Loop: The Effects of The Addictive Nature Of Short-form videos On Users’ Perceived Attention Span And Mood (http://essay.utwente.nl/95551/)

Disclaimer: this is not my field, and I only spent 15 minutes on this, so these may not be the best articles around. On the other hand, the post seems to mention quite a lot of research on this topic, so you could read that, too. To read more, check articles that cite, or were cited by, these. Also, for obvious reasons, there does not seem to be many studies available on long term effects.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#448

Post by frogulis »

SimplyUnknown wrote: post #401
tomjakubowski wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ADHD is so prevalent in the US, far more so than most (all?) other disabilities; I believe one of these must be true: - ADHD is severely over diagnosed - ADHD is a trait that was adaptive in the past, and is only pathologically maladaptive in modern life - ADHD the trait is caused by some aspect of modern life (this seems least likely to me) (saying this as diagnosed, with the usual problems)

Not all of these are mutually exclusive, but there is also a fourth option: - ADHD was severely underdiagnosed in the past and got more accurately diagnosed in recent years

If I'm reading the parent comment correctly, I think they're saying that that the high rates currently being diagnosed require one of their three conditions to be true.

That is, if ADHD is accurately diagnosed, and never had an evolutionary advantage, and isn't caused by some modern factor, then why would ADHD be so highly diagnosed today? Which is an interesting thought in my view

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#449

Post by guerilla_prgrmr »

rocho wrote: post #430
guerilla_prgrmr wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True but the dev’s of the 80’s understood transistors and other things i never needed to know as a millennial. As these things get abstracted, complexity keeps increasing at the top of the stack so thats what’s keeps us employed (for now)

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#450

Post by jaqalopes »

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…

I’m a fellow ADHD sufferer and you’re 100% right that it is disabling in many contexts where “normal” function is optimal. But I want to encourage you not to despair entirely—-there are legitimate ways in which the ADHD mind has an edge. Mainly in recognizing lateral connections that neurotypical people might not see—-in essence, creativity, innovation. Not that neurotypical people can’t be creative, they obviously can be. But the ADHD mind has been shown to have this unusual quality. It’s why people with ADHD are often especially good conversationalists and jokers, even if they are terrible at getting their taxes done on time.
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