281–290 of 495 posts
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How do you deal with too much information if not by reducing the attention span anyway? There is no time to focus, no?
You develop the skill of quickly determining what deserves your attention and what does not. Having a long attention span doesn't imply you give everything your full attention.
I would go further to suggest that not only is there more content, but that content is expressed in a manner intended to only consume a brief amount of attention.
Typically, such content is also presented in a way that encourages the user to continue providing their attention, except that their attention is directed to new content. And so while it may be argued that the person "is still paying attention", the rules of attention are simply different when engaging with such content.
To be clear, I find such touch-and-go content to be generally reprehensible. It lacks nuance, and leaves little room for intelligent discourse. I am simply pointing out that it's very possible that humans are just as capable as they've always been, and it is simply the medium that has changed.
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I know that HN is maybe not a place for such comments, but I strongly belive we need to make "attention span overflow" a thing
(I'm not sure if you were joking or not and I know it's probably not in the same spirit you intended it here / a bit OT but...) I've been using literally that exact expression for a while to describe the situation in which, during somewhat complex discussions within a group, in order to not be perceived as jerks participants are forced to follow an unnecessarily long, repetitive, trivial and most often also completel…
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…
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…
That's what it already is, isn't it? It's not like Galileo could just read a small description on the Universal Law of Gravitation and understand what was going on. Think about explaining solving a linear system of equations vs using a matrix inverse to calculate a solution. As phenomena become better understood, we literally condense disparate observations into more general rules and theories that offer us more clarity and understanding.
I like to follow a bunch of woodworkers on TikTok and once the algorithm gives you the right set of people, you can use the quick videos of how they setup jigs or some interesting joinery they do and riff off it in your own work. Sure if I were a beginner it would be different, but it's a very useful resource for someone with experience.
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This is a submission to a [contest]( https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/01/mysterious-mysterie... ) SMTM are running, so the author is very likely not the normal authors of SMTM.
I still think it's important to note that the blog's work is shoddy. The fact that this blog post is #1 on HN means that multiple people will read SMTM's other blog posts, which contain several falsehoods that they've refused to fix. See, for example, this page https://manifold.markets/Natalia/how-many-of-these-falsemisl... for an incomplete list. I have been trying to get them to remove falsehoods from their blog fo…
That was prescient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854850
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LessWrong is obviously not a cult, the allegations are nonsense. Well established researchers post there (e.g. Paul Christiano) and some even work or worked for OpenAI or DeepMind (e.g. Richard Ngo). It's rather that the cited source "RationalWiki" is a highly politically biased source which routinely attacks anything which is in any way associated with the rationalism community, or which engages with things that are…
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"Safety issues" are to him more like, "the AI will kill everyone to fill its objectives" and less like, "deepfakes are concerning." Though I'm sure he hopped on the "deepfakes are bad" bandwagon at some point to further his time in the spotlight.
> "Safety issues" are to him more like, "the AI will kill everyone to fill its objectives" Yes, and he was way ahead of the curve here, since similar positions got a lot more mainstream in the past years and months. E.g. two of three AI Turing award winners (Hinton and Bengio) now say that superintelligent AI poses a serious extinction risk. OpenAI has also identified the alignment problem as a major issue. Even form…
This is a bubble conversation that makes no sense to people outside of that bubble, and for good reason; it doesn't matter outside of that bubble.
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 the value of the goal they are trying to achieve: https://invisible.college/attention/dissertation/survival.pn...
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[flagged]
LessWrong is obviously not a cult, the allegations are nonsense. Well established researchers post there (e.g. Paul Christiano) and some even work or worked for OpenAI or DeepMind (e.g. Richard Ngo). It's rather that the cited source "RationalWiki" is a highly politically biased source which routinely attacks anything which is in any way associated with the rationalism community, or which engages with things that are…
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…
