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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#471

Post by itronitron »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #463
itronitron wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ADHD is a mismatch of people to the current environment/society rather than a neurotype?

No it's a disorder. What you're saying may be true to an extent, but understanding how the condition works, and how people function, it's a disorder. I think that's a step beyond what you said. Not everyone with unmedicated and untreated with ADHD may feel like they have trouble functioning or a disorder, but many do. It's obvious if you look at their lives. Many kill themselves over it. It may be true that a better…

So I guess I have two opinions on this, maybe they balance out.

Opinion 1, adults should have options/facilities available to them to enable their functioning in modern society which supports administering ADHD treatment (medication) if they so desire. After all, every living thing dies alone.

Opinion 2, children (in the US, and teenagers in particular) are over-diagnosed with ADHD and various other disorders which is a direct consequence on the obsession with academic achievement.

Bottom line, if everyone needs to be on medication in order to be productive in a society then it's the society that has the disorder not the individuals.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#472

Post by DelightOne »

JohnFen wrote: post #453
DelightOne wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that make you feel good compared to reading a couple short feel-good or activating short articles?

I don't think I understand the question. Do articles make you feel good because they're short, rather than because of what they contain?

My point is the effect feel-good, whether it is achieved by avoiding fluff, by (over-)simplifying, by some special content that can only be shown in short form or by feeling more knowledgeable. If you can read more of them, you feel better. I just wondered whether this is the reason few develop the skill - it is mostly not worth the time with no one around usually caring (whether you are superficial or not).

> You can't manage what you can't measure.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#473

Post by fullspectrumdev »

somenameforme wrote: post #399
andirk wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just use all the various sites as tools, instead of having loyalty anywhere. Search for something you're interested in and see what shows up. YouTube is definitely no longer the central repository of everything that it once was. A good way to demonstrate the average difference between YouTube and TikTok is to show the same video from the same guy, but optimized for different platforms. This is a video on deadlift f…

The “meta game” of optimal length on YouTube has been shifting towards longer videos for quite a while - one of the more important metrics towards monetising is “watch hours”. So you get a lot of filler.

YouTube also has shorts, which it measures somewhat differently (as views as opposed to watch hours).

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#474

Post by fullspectrumdev »

nottorp wrote: post #431
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…

> 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.

40% of which is word count filler, and another 50% of which is irrelevant to your purpose.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#475

Post by tarboreus »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #67
tarboreus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just bad now. You never get bored in Die Hard or a Jackie Chan flick.

Pretty sure most films made in 1988 were also bad.

Sure, most of everything is bad. But there were good ones, a lot of them. Especially in the late 80s and 90s.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#476

Post by mikestew »

rypskar wrote: post #389
mikestew wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My regular reminder that 2001: A Space Odyssey was only 2h 23m, and that movie had an intermission at the cinema. Tess of the d'Urbervilles ? 18 minutes longer than M:I, and that one had an intermission, too. Ghandi had an intermission, but $DEITY, no human bladder can hold that much so it was kind of required. Your Marvel movie is approaching 3 hours, and no intermission? Fuck that, I'll watch it at home while your…

Wasn't intermission because movies was on physical rolls (sorry, don't remember correct name) which had a maximum length and they needed an intermission to change roll?

No, soft drinks sold at cinemas in the 60s were much larger than they are today, and no one could hold that much fluid for much more than two hours.

The answers you seek are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark#Use

And the answer to your question, as you now know, is still "no".

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#477

Post by JuanPosadas »

wraptile wrote: post #424
panta wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most of yt and tiktok are a regression against both books and websites.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#478

Post by P_I_Staker »

itronitron wrote: post #471
P_I_Staker wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's a disorder. What you're saying may be true to an extent, but understanding how the condition works, and how people function, it's a disorder. I think that's a step beyond what you said. Not everyone with unmedicated and untreated with ADHD may feel like they have trouble functioning or a disorder, but many do. It's obvious if you look at their lives. Many kill themselves over it. It may be true that a better…

So I guess I have two opinions on this, maybe they balance out. Opinion 1, adults should have options/facilities available to them to enable their functioning in modern society which supports administering ADHD treatment (medication) if they so desire. After all, every living thing dies alone. Opinion 2, children (in the US, and teenagers in particular) are over-diagnosed with ADHD and various other disorders which i…

ADHD is highly UNDER-diagnosed.

> Bottom line, if everyone needs to be on medication in order to be productive in a society then it's the society that has the disorder not the individuals.

A huge percentage of the population aren't even suspected of having ADHD, because they clearly don't. This has become a silly trope, but it doesn't match reality for people with the disorder. It's a far cry from "everyone". There's a very specific cluster of behaviors that may get better or worse over time, but rarely go away.

Our obsession with academic achievement is harder than it seems to address. It will require a fundamental change in society, like capitalism or communism. Even if you get rid of the academic component, it will simply be replaced with some other filter (smokescreen for the elite?), with some unable to keep up.

We need it so that people can live doing pretty much nothing that generates profit. The system doesn't support large numbers of people here, and they often don't do very well, either. Some things could help and we should do.

It seems that we don't really value academic performance. We want a high stakes game to decide who gets to be rich and poor. This fundamentally would need to change, and I don't see an end in sight. We need ladders and nets, and to support careers that don't follow the high_school -> university -> career -> retirement, with no room for interruption.

I recall a real sad comment on reddit about someone that wound up depressed very recently in high school. What he described was the grind of classwork, fitness, and chores that seemed impossible to bear. Get home from a run, try to force your brain to study, then immediately sleep... and for what? You do this forever, now!

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#479

Post by krypton2k »

fleischhauf wrote: post #216
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #112

Permit me to tie a couple of personal observation on this topic. I do not think we "lost" our ability. I think we changed our thinking. I think the world has mostly accepted the "good enough" versus "perfect". As we all have heard, to become an expert, on average we need to pursue the subject for 10 thousand hours (? Malcolm Gladwell). But, we do not need to spend 20 years practicing. We can obtain "good enough" in a…

ADHD is a physical change in the brain tho, it goes so far that it alters the effects of drugs like cocaine

Do you have any more information or links about this please?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#480

Post by throwaway2037 »

blackbear_ wrote: post #447
throwaway2037 wrote: post #428

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 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 Cognit…

Hot stuff. Great reply. Thank you for the scientific search tips!
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