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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#481

Post by colechristensen »

smukherjee19 wrote: post #326
colechristensen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also now I have a magical machine in my pocket where I can tap the screen a few times and get a book read to me sped up to my optimal input speed. Those two things (audiobooks on my phone, the default feature to enable play at 2x-3x speed) have vastly increased the information I absorb. Now if only someone could come up with a screen/document reader with a decent text-to-speech and decent content filtering, it wo…

That's an interesting take on having books read to you! I am genuinely curious though: what do you do with the information you absorb? Are you able to retain all of it and use it at will? If so, do you have any tips on how to do that?

Keep notes on the things i really want to keep, some details and random facts that happen to trigger my memory, and a general sense of the work with most of the rest of the details faded away. Also, you know, entertainment.

No I don’t have eidetic or whatever the version of that is for audio or text. Closer to it when I was younger than I am now. I have a feeling this is something you can train with effort but not exactly sure what that effort is or if I have the motivation to try it.

To remember the most out of reading you have to engage with the material. Keep notes while reading or after, try to summarize what you have read after each session of reading or at the end of each chapter or each day. Ask questions about the material. Physically write these notes and questions down, ideally with actual pens and paper. Additionally engage with other people about what you have read vocally. Reading, writing, and speech engage different but connected pieces of your brain. Engaging with material in multiple modes reinforces memory from multiple directions as does the practice of summarizing, questioning, and discussing. Gets you into somewhat subconscious habits of paying attention to material differently.

But also, not everything is worth remembering. If I need a recording of the material i already have it on paper or an audio file, it doesn’t have to be accessible to my consciousness from my own memory when it’s just right there easily found.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#483

Post by nottorp »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #474
nottorp wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well I was thinking of actual dense technical books not for dummies spam.

If there are any left.

As for irrelevant... you should still skim it. So you know where to look when it becomes relevant next year.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#484

Post by andirk »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #473
somenameforme wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What are these shorts? It looks like common video that is very narrow vertically.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#485

Post by jonathanstrange »

somenameforme wrote: post #462
jonathanstrange wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. Your example illustrates that the quality demands of Harvard entry have declined and it's reasonable to assume that other universities have also become more open, as you claim. You're right about that. Universities are less elitist than they used to be. Nevertheless, the overall demands in higher education have increased tremendously and the courses have also become more focused. In most disciplin…

Why would you call it elitist? From my perspective something like this is the ultimate 'democratization' of education. If you can pass the test - you're in, regardless of who you might otherwise be (or not be). For instance one individual who would have passed a similar exam was Richard Greener [1]. He was the first black man to graduate from Harvard. He did so in 1870, shortly after the Civil War, for some social co…

I didn't talk about democratization (why the scare quotes?). I called it elitist because it's elitist. Harder entry exams are a way to only allow higher education for a much smaller percentage of the population, i.e., to an elite. You're obviously not one of them but there are people who think that the largest percentage possible should benefit from higher education. This also requires it to be affordable economically, of course.

I understand that this idea is not necessarily appealing to elitists and to people who only consider education in terms of the economic benefits it might provide.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#486

Post by GravelRocks »

anthlax wrote: post #452
maroonblazer wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The articles conclusion is explicitly that there is no valuable literature on the subject

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...

How anyone could read that article, even just skim it, and come out thinking that it was presenting evidence that this is a well researched topic is beyond me. The entire point of the article is that they couldn't fine studies on the topic...

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#487

Post by Clamchop »

frogulis wrote: post #448
SimplyUnknown wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are other conditions. There's at least a cultural component in that we haven't always embraced mental health care in the US as much as we do today. Many other parts of the world still don't.

Whether over or underdiagnosed now, it was underdiagnosed in the past.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#488

Post by CatWChainsaw »

Zetice wrote: post #432
cubefox wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't, why do you think that?

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

That's so embarrassingly obtuse I refuse to believe you aren't aware and are just being contrarian.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#489

Post by bombela »

barrysteve wrote: post #350
makeitdouble wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reading books This rhetoric is partly why reading gets such a bad rap. So many people put "reading books" on a pedestal, and cite random educational studies on how the mere act of reading stimulates the brain and is beneficial in itself. But 90% of the books in this world are fucking boring to downright garbage and not worth reading for most people. Telling people to read "books" is as helpful as advising suburban…

I have tried fixing the brake cable on my bike (and other bike repair tasks), by using the myriad of youtube videos assigned for the task. It's actually quite difficult to hold a brake cable in tension, while forcing an old school front derailleur not meant for the bike into millimeter perfect position and at the same time pause/unpause/rewind a youtube video. It is honestly easier to put a book down open to the righ…

> It's actually quite difficult to hold a brake cable in tension, while forcing an old school front derailleur not meant for the bike into millimeter perfect position

Maybe you are missing the tension adjustment screws on the Bowden tube? You ajust the tension if the cable as close as you can with a pair of pliers with one hand, and a screwdriver to lock the cable in the other. The you use the fine adjustment screw to precisely align the chain over the cogs.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#490

Post by somenameforme »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #485
somenameforme wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you call it elitist? From my perspective something like this is the ultimate 'democratization' of education. If you can pass the test - you're in, regardless of who you might otherwise be (or not be). For instance one individual who would have passed a similar exam was Richard Greener [1]. He was the first black man to graduate from Harvard. He did so in 1870, shortly after the Civil War, for some social co…

I didn't talk about democratization (why the scare quotes?). I called it elitist because it's elitist. Harder entry exams are a way to only allow higher education for a much smaller percentage of the population, i.e., to an elite. You're obviously not one of them but there are people who think that the largest percentage possible should benefit from higher education. This also requires it to be affordable economicall…

The scare quotes as I think that's an inappropriate, though common, use of the term.

Rather than argue I'm quite curious of your take on something. Imagine we have a hypothetical individual - Bob. Bob comes from a single parent and poor family. He's the first of his family to attend college. Bob, like most kids doesn't really like school at all. But he eeks by. And he graduates. Having no clue what to do with his life, he decides to whimsically apply for Whatever U, where he's accepted.

Once in he looks for the easiest major - and settles on psychology. Made even easier after noticing all the cute girls in Psych 301. Bob squeezes by mostly using pickaprof, ratemyprofessor, and so on sites to just find the easiest profs who pretty much hand out 4.0s for just showing up. So naturally he ends up a solid 3.0 student. Finally he graduates.

From my perspective, he's now in pretty much the same situation as he was 4 years ago, except now he has 6 figures of debt and a sheet of paper. How would you say Bob has benefited from higher education, in concrete ways? Would you expect his life to be better or worse relative to him just deciding to e.g. pick up an electrician apprenticeship out of high school?

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