I couldn’t even read all the
Have attention spans been declining?
371–380 of 495 posts
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#372There 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…
One thing has changed dramatically in education over just the past 100 years. This [1] is an entrance exam for Harvard in 1869. It was expected that the applicant would be fluent in Greek, Latin, English, that they would have a exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world, be able to carry out complex mathematical calculations, compose geometric proofs, and more. That trend also was the same as you went down to high school and even middle school.
The reason the curriculums were like this is that education was largely optional, and so it was designed for the exceptional over-achievers who would voluntarily, with no extrinsic force, opt into such. Now a days education, including tertiary, is designed for anybody with a pulse. And this creates a terrible scenario for overachievers and underachievers alike. The overachievers are bored senseless in lengthy classes because "Yes, I got what you said 40 minutes ago. Why can't we move on?" By contrast the underachievers lack the attention span and focus to follow a 50, let alone 90, minute lesson, so struggle even given the much slower pace.
A 'TikTok-ified' education is really just a desire to stop wasting so much time, but we waste that time because of this change in education. And far from creating a nation of scholars - middling or otherwise, this change has instead just created a nation where your barista probably has a college degree, and 6 figures of debt to show for it.
[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#373Earlier 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…
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)
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#374No, the brain is self optimizing for less calorie usage, thus the state of affairs is normal. The actor for the interests of all (democratic state) used to have the task to push everyone to their limits, for the benefit of all.
Long for content is still around (e. g. https://www.lrb.co.uk/) but the ruined intellectual allmende is unable to parse it.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#375[dead]
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#376Trying to read classic literature really makes this apparent. Hemingway's Sun Also Rises must have been a riveting adventure story when it was published in 1926, but how can it compete with 10,000 hours of adventure travel on youtube, netflix etc.? Same with Moby Dick in 1850s... these were glimpses into exotic lives rarely heard of back then, but today you can find those stories or similar in vivid moving pictures a…
I am listening to the unabridged audiobook for Les Miserables. Victor goes into tons of unnecessary detail about things - as an example they arrive at a monestary and he tells the entiry story of the place, including details and rules for who can wear what kind of color clothing. I recon that it is considered one of the great and famous books, but it could have drastically been improved if he had had an editor. A mod…
I am reading the same book right now, but with my eyes rather than ears. I don't actually mind the detail in retrospect, because it's used both to add flavour to the story and to reflect on ideas that are very unique, at least to me. I do agree that it's a bit terse at times though. The part about the monastery did make me bored
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#377Permit 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…
> I think the world has mostly accepted the "good enough" versus "perfect".
I think you're correct, but I would also argue that this makes everybody worse off, and therefore, is a wrong trend. It cancels, to some extent, the advantages of division of labor, because the society is chasing diversity of experience rather than depth of it. It is also impractical because now each individual has to deal with more flaws of good enough products, which pulls everybody down.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#378> whether the introduction of the internet may be harmful to cognitive performance
surely the positive benefits outweigh any loss of attention span, in terms of the entire internet as a technology?
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#379There 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…
Yeah. I got myself a songwriting course and it's certainly not compressed, more like 20 - 30 hours in total length. And those guys do a lot of, let's call it, meandering in the topics. Like, one of the basic topics was time signature and time signature notation. And the basics are somewhat simple indeed, but after a minute or two, there's a detour into why german Volksmusik is different about on- and off-beats, and later on there was a detour into irish music and shanteys. This very much reminds me of some of the more advanced university classes - very much stringent about a topic, but entirely ready to look at the flowers left and right.
And while it makes it longer, I find it helps my retention. For one, I have to allocate 40 minutes to an hour for a course part - and that's enough time to make it a conscious decision. And it helps to put new information into context much better, which very much helps retention. Heck, even something like a cat crashing into a keyboard helps remembering things, haha.
Re: Have attention spans been declining?
#380I think it's a definite possibility given a couple factors:
- for one,