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 and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it's committed to memory, and you don't have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it's beautiful to see.
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 who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we're accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don't have time to adequately question is high).
Developing some skills requires focus and careful study. We're robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.
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 speed of the world and young(er) people.
Example: I tried Googling for "does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?". None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing "it's never been worse" blog posts.
TL;DR if we keep the direct environment of our child clean and limit distractions she's calm, and focused. If we don't she gets whiny and somewhat unbearable.
I'm raising a child right now and it's pretty simple to observe a few simple patterns:
1. if there is stuff in her visible range during any activity that is even mildly interesting she wants it and it distracts from any activity. be it her own scooter, or her own toys lying around. denying her access to it makes her upset.
2. if there is any food in her visible range, cookies, fruits, anything, while eating dinner, she wants it and it makes feeding harder. denying access to it will make her upset and scream.
3. if there is a screen of any sort or a bright light on she will stare at it. denying her access to it makes her upset unless I turn it off and put my devices away.
4. We don't have a TV so she enjoys books a lot and we have improved our eating habits which makes it A LOT easier to feed her the same her healthy food.
5. Grand parents think they should bring a bunch of gifts every time they visit meaning our place is filled with junk, infinite amounts of clothes and they get upset when they don't get to gift it much like the kids that receive them.
What I'm trying to say it that even taking away all the digital distractions, a lot of these simple things are things I and many people around me did not have in abundance as a child.
It's not just because the digital stuff that attention spans decline. It's because EVERYTHING is noisy. Even the children books and toys are flashy and noisy.
It's not like you wake up one day and have attention or not, it's something that is learned over long periods of time.
How is any one supposed to grow up learning focus with all that junk around? I think a lot of these things are designed to get attention from children. The toy, book, and even children clothing manufacturers compete with each other on attention, ultimately I would argue with the goal of making the biggest profits.
> 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 keep hearing this but is there actual evidence? My anecdata is that I can watch tiktoks and read programming books all day without one impacting the other. I honestly have trouble believing that our attention mechanism is so flawed it can be broken so easily.
I think the more likely explanation is that consumed content is just more efficient these days. In other words, it's not our attention span that's changing but our data culture. I think that's a good thing too.
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 cleaning our jacuzzi bath tub the other day. The previous owners had never cleaned it, so black gunk came out of the jets.
A YouTube video (that was actually a TikTok!) suggested unscrewing the jet nozzles (amongst other things), which she demonstrated as a really simple "just unscrew them" sort of deal.
As it happens, not every jet nozzle is meant to be removed! And not every jet nozzle should be removed! Also, it is really hard to get replacement nozzles after you crack one because it was affixed to the housing!
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.
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 requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory.
I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified" engineering curriculum would look like.
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.
> You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory.
This happened a while ago and the solution to that was specialization and not tiktokization. As much as I am for modernizing, uhm, everything, I'm not sure I see an advantage in the current trend that's happening right now.
Quality have been declining on the software side, but that's only because I am exposed to that as a software developer. Everyday items quality are on the decline too (my Nike -will be the last ones- shoes have deteriorated in the interval of 3 months, just ridiculous).
So here we have it: a combination of short-span attentions, a system that rewards the short-term and a political class that does not care. It's a mystery how our societies have not collapsed yet. Or maybe we are close?
If there’s one thing I internalized about learning is that consuming content and reading doesn’t mean learning. In fact, nowadays, if I want to learn something I make summaries with my own words and create pages where I connect other stuff I think are related to that concept. (discussing it with ChatGPT is also a way to practice handling the subject in a back and forth conversation)
“Compressing” content to the bare minimum to be quickly consumed in 30 seconds can be good for news or being aware something exists maybe, but it’s terrible for learning. If you’re not actively engaged in a task and struggling with it you’re not learning anything new.
> I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified" engineering curriculum would look like.
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.
> There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more.
Attention span cannot be measured by what we don’t pay attention to. And there has always - always - been more information than anyone could process. I think it quite obviously is determined by how long we pay attention to things we chose to engage with. Clearly watching 15 second short clips instead of reading books has had a detrimental effect.
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 kids to go "places" and see them stay home after the fifth trip to Wallmart.
Would a random kid be better off reading "Rich dad Poor dad" than try to fix the brake cable of his bike ? Should they read "The Boys from Biloxi" or go to a theater with their friends and have an actual social exchange with a real human ? Are the dozens of self help books pusblished every week better than their Substack equivalent ?
> Clearly watching 15 second short clips instead of reading books has had a detrimental effect.
This isn't clear and very much depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Want to get deeply engrossed in fiction? Sure. On the other hand, I'm currently reading a book about sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old, and it's way too long - just jam packed with repetition and fluff that doesn't help at all. There's really a few critical pieces of information that you need to understand in order to sleep train your baby, and then a few more secondary pieces of information that are interesting/useful context around why sleep training works and the studies that support the methods in the book.
Particularly since I have a four month old baby and thus very little free time, 15 second videos/blog posts/whatever other short form content on this topic would clearly be superior to reading the book.
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 would be truly magical (read just the bulk text not and don't vocalize every single piece of text, most of which are major distractions to flow and don't need to be read)
Part of the reason I'm learning a bunch of ML things is so I can make this for myself.
On that topic, does anyone know of a really good, open, text to speech model? All of the ones I have been able to find have ranged between garbage and mediocre, none near "good enough" for the thing to be useful to me.
I used Amazon Polly (text to speech engine) on a project a few years ago - the “neural” voices were decent. I’ve since heard much better synthetic voice engines, but don’t know names. What’s the best quality one you have found recently?
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?
I'm reading a book on sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old, I think, and it's like 75% unnecessary. I attribute it to the fact that when it was out, there were fewer books/other media competing for attention, plus it wasn't easy to go find additional information by Googling, so people attributed value to extra, borderline-useless info in books.
The method we leaned on (with success) was a one-page PDF shared by another parent. So many books of this sort are a bullet-point list fleshed out to justify the sale price, and little else. Case studies and history and whatever else.
I think this is just a result of too many things grabbing attention - especially in almost everyone's career this seemed to be the norm for the last 15 years or so. The jobs we do, the tools we use, and the structuring of companies and employee hierarchy, projects and general culture have all introduced elements that force you to frequently context switch all the time. Add to that, things on the internet like Social Media, apps pushing useless notifications all the time, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, etc where things are updated very frequently and if you're participating on those platforms, it creates somewhat of an urge to keep checking new stuff as it comes.
Engineers can choose to have some flexibility, however the managers and upper managers have no breaks, and it kind of sucks for them to zoom in and out of contexts between meetings, and it often makes them lose track of things. If workload is not shared, it very quickly becomes a shitshow altogether. All my managers in my last 3 companies were struggling to keep up with what was going on, and had no rest; they would get pinged about issues even while they were on PTO which seemed inevitable.
Other high context-switching jobs may be those of doctors, stock brokers and analysts (they have to keep tracking a million things every day), lawyers, and sales guys. They come with their own way of causing mental overload quite frequently unfortunately.
Honestly I feel it's the circumstances some of which are in our control that can be adjusted to minimize distractions and remove some of the useless things that we think are not needed at all. It's no wonder that those "distraction elimination" browser plugins and mobile phone apps are a real thing!
Yes! The Tiktok format has been fantastic for getting creators to consider what the core of their messages is and edit out everything else. A well-made Tiktok video watched 5x is more valuable than a 10 minute YouTube video where the camera is left running and filler added just to pad out the monetization minimum time.
> 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 and then a 30 second tiktok,
> it's beautiful to see.
I totally agree. Fleshing out subject matter is seen everywhere, films, books, education, and what the internet has delivered is near instant communication, and access to a much wider array of knowledge and things to see and do. More people can travel the world with ease and relative low cost, so why not try to be more informed about the laws and culture.
When I look at a country that I might want to visit, I have never seen a TL;DR of their laws for inhabitants or tourists, so that puts me off travelling because I dont want to fall foul of the law.
I have however been able to establish that some parts of the German Autobahn has no speed limit when conditions permit, and there is extra car insurance which can be purchased if one is wanting to drive at faster than normal speeds.
The same goes for driving on the Nordschleife, there is an extra insurance option available to purchase in case an accident happens when driving around there.
Considering all the tech and knowledge that exists and Google, the information is still incredibly fragmented, but some of the older professions like law and medicine rely on this knowledge being fragmented in order to justify their existence and I think it gives away their subconcious bias.
You are correct! We may be dismayed by how fast we approached new information (and thereby the speed of action), however, productivity has been steadily rising. On top of that, we are able to act and learn more variety than ever before. There are clear downsides and upsides to the speed. Overall, faster has shown to be better.
> 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 and then a 30 second tiktok
It's a thin illusion. Brain candy masquerading as real food. Those snap-cut tiktok cooking instructionals aren't teaching my girlfriend to cook the dishes any more than a snap-cut BJJ youtube short could teach me how to do a berimbolo. She's gonna have to read a recipe and spend hours in the kitchen, and I'm gonna have to spend hours on the mat with a training partner.
She's gonna have to read a recipe and spend hours in the kitchen
You are missing the point. Something might take hours in the kitchen to make, but you don't need to have the entire thing on video. I don't need to see someone make all the shapes with the bread. I don't need to see them wait 45 minutes for something to cook.
Most recipes aren't hours long. Most of them are a list of ingredients and a few short paragraphs: Most online recipes reflect this as well.
And if someone is really unfamiliar, they can look up additional resources. "Best way to dice an onion" or "how to peel a tomato" both have plenty of videos.
I'm going to guess that it is the same for a berimbolo: You don't need to watch hours of someone else on a mat. You just need the instructions so that you can do the practice - just like you don't need to watch someone else practice an instrument, but you might be helped see how they play basic stuff.
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 few weeks, or even few hours (obviously depending on the subject).
For example, to win the Grand Prix de la baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris (i.e., French Baguette Competition of Paris), many spend a lifetime perfecting their craft. I can teach you in a day how to make an edible baguette that the average consumer will enjoy.
I think our "attention span" has shifted to "good enough" in many instances. I do not think this destroyed our attention span capability, it just made it slightly different.
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. He became bored, and started whittling for the same amount of time. Once they returned to "civilization", they "became" ADHD again.
As someone already noted, in my experience humans cannot multitask. We can context switch, some very slowly, and some very fast. But, we do not multitask.
> 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 than neurotypical minds. ADHD is the inability to regulate focus on specific activities, particularly ones that are boring and not what the individual finds stimulating. Camping and fishing are not what I would typically consider a difficult task to focus on for someone with ADHD. Especially because it’s a physical activity, which are often better suited for an ADHD mind rather than mental tasks that involve being sedentary.
Perhaps what you’re unintentionally getting at is people with ADHD are much better suited for specific tasks than neurotypicals, and society is largely set up to favor neurotypicals at the expense of those with ADHD.
> 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 past, because I was watching ants move sticks around.
ADHD is a disability, not a difference of ability. It's not very enjoyable for me to accept as I'm reasonably bright, but I'm mentally disabled in a way that someone of equivalent intelligence without ADHD is not. They can more easily achieve what they want in life than I can. I don't think there's any task in which someone with ADHD is more suited to than someone without; there are tasks which are less difficult for the person with ADHD than other tasks, but ADHD doesn't bestow many, if any, advantages over a neurotypical person.
There was a recent brief blog post[1] on this from Scott Alexander, if you're curious to read more, but I've come to the same conclusion independently.
> I think we changed our thinking. I think the world has mostly accepted the "good enough" versus "perfect". [...] For example, to win [a famous baguette competition] many spend a lifetime perfecting their craft.
Hasn't it always been that way, though?
Decades or centuries ago we've been doing things (e.g. breadmaking) with fewer resources and worse tools and tighter margins, so "good enough" was probably even more important, rather than less. Great works were often made despite those limits, rather than in concert with them. Surely the techniques and investments used in competition are not the same ones that baker would use to feed a large hungry crowd.
"Perfect" probably only showed up either (A) where that's just the next frontier for a successful professional to stay engaged in their craft or promote their brand and (B) products commissioned by figurative if not literal royalty.
My attention span is making me re-read your comment to decipher whether I agree or disagree.
Jury is still out on this one :)
Anyways, over a decade back, I was watching a recording of a musical artist from either the 70s or 80s, and was surprised at the quality of the presentation (audio, music, harmony within the team) and was thinking on the same lines - good vs good enough, and how this team working in the 70s made musical magic.
I think the constraints those days made the masters really practice practice practice so that they could be great at the spur of the moment. A lot of people today may be more expert in synthesizing music so they can take a second's worth of snippet here, 5 seconds of snippets there, and eventually make something good, but it is all editing and they may not be able to do that live, but the old timey greats had to perform live, and for that they had to be great.
I am not saying no one does live music nowadays, quite the contrary, just saying that a lot of great music comes from people who never do live music, and that is because they can afford the luxury of 'editing' (which is kinda similar to divided attention span). Similarly, for the baker once the bread has gone bad there is nothing they can do but to start over, and that would be the incentive to get everything right.
I think we used to strive more for perfection. Changing sheets, ironing, folding clothes.. But also in trade, just look at all the ornaments.. attention to details, caring for tools / materials. When was the last time you got a suit made?
At some point we compromised and slapped a shiny finish on it. I blame advertising.
> 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.
What happened in the past is that you obtained good enough with a lot more hours and effort then now. And perfection, however you define it, was even further out of reach.
I think it is related but not the same - instant gratification is what leads to our brains to shorten the attention span. I could see it happen to me in the last few years. I sort of stagnated in almost every endeavor because I was picking low hanging fruits if you will and did only the things that I could easily see the end result for…
Until I started training for a half marathon. Not having run seriously in my life, I challenged myself to join my friends for a 10K last year. The training was an unexpected lesson in humility and thought - I could not go for the 10K regardless of how motivated or pumped up I was. I needed to train myself to get there properly… 2 KM on day 1, 5KM by day 15, and 10K by day 30 or so. With enough rest in between. I could do the 10K last year happily.
This year I am training for the 21K. I’m practicing for 3 months slowly improving my pace and endurance.
I’m not what one would call athletic. I’m still doing it and it makes me incredibly happy.
The analogy I went for is - the same applies to learning anything new, or mastering something- it takes time, and continuous effort. Not instant gratification. It sounds very logical and simple in hindsight, but I had to learn it as an adult now.
I follow Natália on twitter, and she's repeatedly tried to get them to address her criticisms, to no avail as far as I've seen. It's not a good look for a supposedly scientific blog, especially given that her criticisms are detailed and data-based.
I don't think we should dismiss things based purely on the source, but caution seems warranted (as always, I suppose.)
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.
Trying 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 and audio everywhere, in much more digestible forms.
I really wish I could appreciate these great human achievements in the arts, but at least for books, I don't think my tech-atrophied brain has the ability.
I don't think you read Hemingway or Melville for riveting stories per se, but for their prose. The way they convey their stories in words that pique your curiosity or tickle your aesthetic sense. Words that express an idea or feeling you'd not encountered before, or express an idea or feeling you are familiar with in a totally fresh and unfamiliar way (btw their styles are very different, so you may very well find one engaging while the other leaves you flat, and of course some people will enjoy both or neither).
For example, I have never read "The Sun Also Rises," but I looked at the sample on Amazon and came across this on the second page: "I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face..." After a few matter-of-fact paragraphs, the narrator suddenly slaps the reader with this frank and funny statement of his utter cynicism. That kind of thing pulls me in. I want to know more about this narrator and see what other shocking things he may have to say.
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 tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.
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 Whom the Bell Tolls" was 75,000. [2]. "The Old Man and the Sea" was published in Life magazine, with a circulation of millions.[3]
5,000 copies was a lot for the time. The book was culturally significant, and Hemingway became a celebrity for the time. I think this was as close to a minor "influencer" someone could be back then:
> Still, the book sold well, and young women began to emulate Brett while male students at Ivy League universities wanted to become "Hemingway heroes." Scribner's encouraged the publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American phenomenon"—a celebrity to the point that his divorce from Richardson and marriage to Pfeiffer attracted media attention.
> I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today
I can't say what constituted "most film" in 1926 (are we going by what sold the most tickets? big blockbusters versus daily newsreels & cartoons?) but if you look at the era of 1925-1927 it includes Phantom of the Opera, Battleship Potemkin, The Vanishing American, The Bat, Metropolis, and Wings. Many of this list is iconic to this day to where they continue to be referenced & emulated in pop culture that many people recognize even if they haven't seen the originals before.
Granted this discussion will be hamstrung by how much film has been "lost" with so much of that content no longer in living memory at all (to say if it was masterpieces or crappy filler).
Books don't have to be experienced as vicarious adventures. That's what YA lit is, mostly, but we can read books for their insight rather than fantasizing about being participants in a series of events that they're narrating. There's no reason to transform their thoughtfulness into the sort of disjointed juvenile power fantasies that modern movies are attempting to appeal to.
Also, you don't have to read literature or novels. Read the narratives and nonfiction around what people experienced in times and places that will never be experienced again, and that youtube and netflix don't care about. Read about thoughts and reasoning that exceptional and forgotten people had in the 19th century that are ripe for rediscovery.
The death of attention span is real, but the idea that the substance of "content" now is of better quality than the writing in 1890 is a slander. It's just the difference between a quick, tasty, and a bit vulgar value meal at McDonald's vs. an actual high quality meal. The laziness gets addictive.
I'd like to believe it is reversible. It's not a genetic problem so it is a problem of environment. If you tech detoxed for a whole year living in the woods or something then tried to read Moby Dick it would likely be very tolerable again.
You could study some people who have gone to prison and have little opportunity for endless media consumption.
Relatedly, I've found my life-long "sleep problems" go away very fast if I stop using electronics or electric lights after sundown.
Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a button like you're living in a World's Fair crossed with Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired as early as you do if you don't do those things. Live like it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd have guessed?
Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working adults who need to Get Shit Done at night and zero other people you know are living on that kind of schedule—plus, Winter nights are way too long—but it worked. Sun goes down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by—and you'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and fast, time to go to bed.
Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with, while I was trying it.
Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another perspective on ordinary modern life.
Moby Dick was never meant to be read how it is read now. It was originally a serial, so like a webcomic or a fanfic that's actively being worked on. Those are still very popular mediums of media.
I don't need to spend a year in the woods for my attention span to come back. A day or so is enough for me to get in the place where I'm able to get lost in a good book. A soon as I'm back within short reach of the internet my attention span goes to hell again.
They're a different epistemology. Tools of storytelling - video vs. book in this case - are being conflated with their use. They are tools not exclusive to a single epistemology, many ways to explore many perspectives of 'what'.
Contrast, for example that either of these books' narration allows a reader to fill in a lot of the blanks with experience, both real and imagined, constructing it for themselves even down to the temperature of the air, shade of light at dusk, smell of the air, exact tone and pitch of voice of a speaker. Vs. a video where the experience is fully narrated and scenes presented in 4k. Is the video 'more digestible' because it's a different thing being digested?
Not that these tables can't and often aren't reversed. Some vloggers say little, sometimes 'scaffolding' only some understanding through a bit of backstory, or allow their audience to similarly construct experiences of the pieces of a journey. And some books are instruction manuals, or unintentionally read as so.
A tool, be that video, text, audio, game, is only that. It's just a medium, a method that's surface to the deeper world view of the 'maker'.
Popular literature of years past looked more like those trashy-cover, cheaply-made, deteriorating, fits-in-a-suit-jacket-outer-pocket-without-wrecking-the-drape, thin genre novels you sometimes see carefully preserved in bookstores today, that never saw a hardcover printing (LOL, why? Pick one up, and 99% of the time they're clearly hastily-written formulaic crap), than Hemingway or Melville (the latter of whom, famously, had to be "re-discovered" in order for us to recognize his name today—he'd vanished from pop-consiousness very fast). Or "penny dreadfuls" (similar deal) before that.
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 modern author would have had one and would have produced a better book.
In fact, why shouldn't modern books be better? Nearly everything else is (compare central heating to a fireplace), and the rest disappear once you account for the price you pay for it.
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
So don't read those ones. Read books about things that can't be replicated by video, like Joyce's wordplay. It's like how photography liberates painting from realism.
And I fully empathize with your difficulty in appreciating such works of fiction. Maybe I ought to try reading one this summer myself...
What you're mentioning has little to do with technology and nothing to do with attention span. Those books just don't give you anything you want. Well, why read them? I think microprocessors are great achievements, but I struggle to think how a work of fiction can be a great achievement. I don't think the world would be very different if neither of them had ever been written.
I find this a very frustrating topic. I've studied psychology so I always feel compelled to look at the data first, but here I'm going to focus more on personal experience.
For me, the short answer is: it depends. Somtimes, I do have a short attention span--I'll start watching a video but then also look at the comments and suggested videos at the same time.
But if I find a truly interestng article or video, I will give it complete attention, even if it's a longform article or a half-hour documentary. I listen to hour-long lectures and podcasts.
What I don't like about this entire phenomenon is that people saw attention spans were declining and then decided to create stuff that doesn't require much attention.
I think instead of creating more short content, we should have made it scarce. People will consume what is available. There is much more short-form content available today than it was 5 years ago, because social media turned it into an advantage.
We should have continued creating long-form content. People would have paid attention to it if that was the only thing available.
I'd also partly blame the idea that you must be reading a lot, watching a lot, keep up with everything, and in general get more things done. So people turn to summaries and bullets, just to avoid being "left behind."
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...
I may be reading this incorrectly, but in the article, the 65% appears to be authors confidence in the statement that attention spans appear to be declining, as denoted by the sub-script. Whereas in the HN title it reads as if it's saying a "65% decline in attention span".
Various other assertions in the post also have sub-script confidences associated e.g. "my guess: yes90%".
I could totally believe that there has been a 65% decline in attention span. "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari certainly makes 65% seem conservative!
1. It will definitely rain, on 75% of the relevant area.
2. It will definitely rain, for 75% of the relevant time period.
3. It will rain with an intensity of 75% of the maximum our instruments can measure.
4. Three out of four meteorologists think it will rain.
5. It will rain on 75% of the population.
6. It will rain on everyone, but 75% of the population forgot their umbrella.
7. It will rai
8. 25% chance of dry.
9. 25% chance of snow.
10. When you become trapped in a Groundhog Day-type loop and are forced to repeat today three more times, then a subsequent analysis will show that it rained on exactly three of the four total days. Probably.
For related reasons, I like the blog's claim that much of the difficulty in establishing whether the proposition is true or not is because none of the wealth of literature on attention span was in the form of long term studies. Perhaps the researchers got bored and moved on to something else!
Thanks for this comment, yes this title is wrong and should be changed. The article's conclusion is:
> It seems likely to me that individual attention spans have declined (I’d give it ~70%), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the decline was relatively small, noisy & dependent on specific tests.
Context since this has now been fixed: the original title as submitted was "Have attention spans been declining? – Yes, 65%". The bit after the dash was erroneously added by the submitter and was not part of the article's actual title.
Disagree. Article titles on the web are often very bad. Often this is for clickbait reasons, but also frequently just because the author was not writing for the HN front page as their audience. Almost always, I prefer the rewritten headlines on HN. However, this seems labor intensive to accomplish, and there is usually a delay before the edited title appears. What I wish is for article submitters to consider the use case, and rewrite the headline to conform to HN guidelines on submission.
Well, it's a balancing act. The original title may represent the article more accurately than the submitter's title, or it may be misleading clickbait and the submitter is trying to improve that. The policy here seems to be the best middle ground we can do, mostly go by the original title but also be ready to edit away from clickbait (which of course is subjective.)
There are some good reasons this isn't the case. Often the submission title itself has something wrong in it, or is click-bait-y, or just needs some pointless fat trimmed from it to get to the point.
It would be nice if they either did or didn't. The current system where submitters are encouraged to carefully choose a title and moderators are encouraged to stomp on it is the worst of both worlds.
Thanks for mentioning that book. I am trying to decide if it's worth reading. The negative reviews agree with the main premise of the book but say it's short and superficial. Is there information in there worth reading beyond the usual tips ie keeping your phone in another room, avoid news first thing in the morning, no screen time 2 hours before bed, long cardio workouts, etc?
I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a practical title, though there are a few practical tips along the lines you mention, the point of the book is more about the societal problem than the individual. But as someone who gets highly frustrated with my inability to focus on occasion, I would say it's reasonably cathartic.
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.
Readit News
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 and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it's committed to memory, and you don't have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it's beautiful to see.
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 who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we're accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don't have time to adequately question is high).
Developing some skills requires focus and careful study. We're robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.
Example: I tried Googling for "does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?". None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing "it's never been worse" blog posts.
I'm raising a child right now and it's pretty simple to observe a few simple patterns:
1. if there is stuff in her visible range during any activity that is even mildly interesting she wants it and it distracts from any activity. be it her own scooter, or her own toys lying around. denying her access to it makes her upset.
2. if there is any food in her visible range, cookies, fruits, anything, while eating dinner, she wants it and it makes feeding harder. denying access to it will make her upset and scream.
3. if there is a screen of any sort or a bright light on she will stare at it. denying her access to it makes her upset unless I turn it off and put my devices away.
4. We don't have a TV so she enjoys books a lot and we have improved our eating habits which makes it A LOT easier to feed her the same her healthy food.
5. Grand parents think they should bring a bunch of gifts every time they visit meaning our place is filled with junk, infinite amounts of clothes and they get upset when they don't get to gift it much like the kids that receive them.
What I'm trying to say it that even taking away all the digital distractions, a lot of these simple things are things I and many people around me did not have in abundance as a child.
It's not just because the digital stuff that attention spans decline. It's because EVERYTHING is noisy. Even the children books and toys are flashy and noisy.
It's not like you wake up one day and have attention or not, it's something that is learned over long periods of time.
How is any one supposed to grow up learning focus with all that junk around? I think a lot of these things are designed to get attention from children. The toy, book, and even children clothing manufacturers compete with each other on attention, ultimately I would argue with the goal of making the biggest profits.
I keep hearing this but is there actual evidence? My anecdata is that I can watch tiktoks and read programming books all day without one impacting the other. I honestly have trouble believing that our attention mechanism is so flawed it can be broken so easily.
I think the more likely explanation is that consumed content is just more efficient these days. In other words, it's not our attention span that's changing but our data culture. I think that's a good thing too.
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 cleaning our jacuzzi bath tub the other day. The previous owners had never cleaned it, so black gunk came out of the jets.
A YouTube video (that was actually a TikTok!) suggested unscrewing the jet nozzles (amongst other things), which she demonstrated as a really simple "just unscrew them" sort of deal.
As it happens, not every jet nozzle is meant to be removed! And not every jet nozzle should be removed! Also, it is really hard to get replacement nozzles after you crack one because it was affixed to the housing!
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.
... and you've already forgotten about the book with actual in depth info.
You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory.
I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified" engineering curriculum would look like.
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...
This happened a while ago and the solution to that was specialization and not tiktokization. As much as I am for modernizing, uhm, everything, I'm not sure I see an advantage in the current trend that's happening right now.
Quality have been declining on the software side, but that's only because I am exposed to that as a software developer. Everyday items quality are on the decline too (my Nike -will be the last ones- shoes have deteriorated in the interval of 3 months, just ridiculous).
So here we have it: a combination of short-span attentions, a system that rewards the short-term and a political class that does not care. It's a mystery how our societies have not collapsed yet. Or maybe we are close?
“Compressing” content to the bare minimum to be quickly consumed in 30 seconds can be good for news or being aware something exists maybe, but it’s terrible for learning. If you’re not actively engaged in a task and struggling with it you’re not learning anything new.
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.
Attention span cannot be measured by what we don’t pay attention to. And there has always - always - been more information than anyone could process. I think it quite obviously is determined by how long we pay attention to things we chose to engage with. Clearly watching 15 second short clips instead of reading books has had a detrimental effect.
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 kids to go "places" and see them stay home after the fifth trip to Wallmart.
Would a random kid be better off reading "Rich dad Poor dad" than try to fix the brake cable of his bike ? Should they read "The Boys from Biloxi" or go to a theater with their friends and have an actual social exchange with a real human ? Are the dozens of self help books pusblished every week better than their Substack equivalent ?
This isn't clear and very much depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Want to get deeply engrossed in fiction? Sure. On the other hand, I'm currently reading a book about sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old, and it's way too long - just jam packed with repetition and fluff that doesn't help at all. There's really a few critical pieces of information that you need to understand in order to sleep train your baby, and then a few more secondary pieces of information that are interesting/useful context around why sleep training works and the studies that support the methods in the book.
Particularly since I have a four month old baby and thus very little free time, 15 second videos/blog posts/whatever other short form content on this topic would clearly be superior to reading the book.
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 would be truly magical (read just the bulk text not and don't vocalize every single piece of text, most of which are major distractions to flow and don't need to be read)
Part of the reason I'm learning a bunch of ML things is so I can make this for myself.
On that topic, does anyone know of a really good, open, text to speech model? All of the ones I have been able to find have ranged between garbage and mediocre, none near "good enough" for the thing to be useful to me.
I am far quicker at reading than listening.
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?
Engineers can choose to have some flexibility, however the managers and upper managers have no breaks, and it kind of sucks for them to zoom in and out of contexts between meetings, and it often makes them lose track of things. If workload is not shared, it very quickly becomes a shitshow altogether. All my managers in my last 3 companies were struggling to keep up with what was going on, and had no rest; they would get pinged about issues even while they were on PTO which seemed inevitable.
Other high context-switching jobs may be those of doctors, stock brokers and analysts (they have to keep tracking a million things every day), lawyers, and sales guys. They come with their own way of causing mental overload quite frequently unfortunately.
Honestly I feel it's the circumstances some of which are in our control that can be adjusted to minimize distractions and remove some of the useless things that we think are not needed at all. It's no wonder that those "distraction elimination" browser plugins and mobile phone apps are a real thing!
2023: “GPT make regex to remove white space”
I think every single SEO content farm, and food receipy blog, would disagree with that.
I'd wager low quality/unoptimised content suffers from data decay much faster than concise, correct content
This may be part of the reason Google presenting irrelevant SEO drivel all the more infuriating for users
> it's beautiful to see.
I totally agree. Fleshing out subject matter is seen everywhere, films, books, education, and what the internet has delivered is near instant communication, and access to a much wider array of knowledge and things to see and do. More people can travel the world with ease and relative low cost, so why not try to be more informed about the laws and culture.
When I look at a country that I might want to visit, I have never seen a TL;DR of their laws for inhabitants or tourists, so that puts me off travelling because I dont want to fall foul of the law.
I have however been able to establish that some parts of the German Autobahn has no speed limit when conditions permit, and there is extra car insurance which can be purchased if one is wanting to drive at faster than normal speeds.
The same goes for driving on the Nordschleife, there is an extra insurance option available to purchase in case an accident happens when driving around there.
Considering all the tech and knowledge that exists and Google, the information is still incredibly fragmented, but some of the older professions like law and medicine rely on this knowledge being fragmented in order to justify their existence and I think it gives away their subconcious bias.
Dead Comment
It's a thin illusion. Brain candy masquerading as real food. Those snap-cut tiktok cooking instructionals aren't teaching my girlfriend to cook the dishes any more than a snap-cut BJJ youtube short could teach me how to do a berimbolo. She's gonna have to read a recipe and spend hours in the kitchen, and I'm gonna have to spend hours on the mat with a training partner.
You are missing the point. Something might take hours in the kitchen to make, but you don't need to have the entire thing on video. I don't need to see someone make all the shapes with the bread. I don't need to see them wait 45 minutes for something to cook.
Most recipes aren't hours long. Most of them are a list of ingredients and a few short paragraphs: Most online recipes reflect this as well.
And if someone is really unfamiliar, they can look up additional resources. "Best way to dice an onion" or "how to peel a tomato" both have plenty of videos.
I'm going to guess that it is the same for a berimbolo: You don't need to watch hours of someone else on a mat. You just need the instructions so that you can do the practice - just like you don't need to watch someone else practice an instrument, but you might be helped see how they play basic stuff.
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 few weeks, or even few hours (obviously depending on the subject).
For example, to win the Grand Prix de la baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris (i.e., French Baguette Competition of Paris), many spend a lifetime perfecting their craft. I can teach you in a day how to make an edible baguette that the average consumer will enjoy.
I think our "attention span" has shifted to "good enough" in many instances. I do not think this destroyed our attention span capability, it just made it slightly different.
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. He became bored, and started whittling for the same amount of time. Once they returned to "civilization", they "became" ADHD again.
As someone already noted, in my experience humans cannot multitask. We can context switch, some very slowly, and some very fast. But, we do not multitask.
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 than neurotypical minds. ADHD is the inability to regulate focus on specific activities, particularly ones that are boring and not what the individual finds stimulating. Camping and fishing are not what I would typically consider a difficult task to focus on for someone with ADHD. Especially because it’s a physical activity, which are often better suited for an ADHD mind rather than mental tasks that involve being sedentary.
Perhaps what you’re unintentionally getting at is people with ADHD are much better suited for specific tasks than neurotypicals, and 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 past, because I was watching ants move sticks around.
ADHD is a disability, not a difference of ability. It's not very enjoyable for me to accept as I'm reasonably bright, but I'm mentally disabled in a way that someone of equivalent intelligence without ADHD is not. They can more easily achieve what they want in life than I can. I don't think there's any task in which someone with ADHD is more suited to than someone without; there are tasks which are less difficult for the person with ADHD than other tasks, but ADHD doesn't bestow many, if any, advantages over a neurotypical person.
There was a recent brief blog post[1] on this from Scott Alexander, if you're curious to read more, but I've come to the same conclusion independently.
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-mode...
Hasn't it always been that way, though?
Decades or centuries ago we've been doing things (e.g. breadmaking) with fewer resources and worse tools and tighter margins, so "good enough" was probably even more important, rather than less. Great works were often made despite those limits, rather than in concert with them. Surely the techniques and investments used in competition are not the same ones that baker would use to feed a large hungry crowd.
"Perfect" probably only showed up either (A) where that's just the next frontier for a successful professional to stay engaged in their craft or promote their brand and (B) products commissioned by figurative if not literal royalty.
Anyways, over a decade back, I was watching a recording of a musical artist from either the 70s or 80s, and was surprised at the quality of the presentation (audio, music, harmony within the team) and was thinking on the same lines - good vs good enough, and how this team working in the 70s made musical magic.
I think the constraints those days made the masters really practice practice practice so that they could be great at the spur of the moment. A lot of people today may be more expert in synthesizing music so they can take a second's worth of snippet here, 5 seconds of snippets there, and eventually make something good, but it is all editing and they may not be able to do that live, but the old timey greats had to perform live, and for that they had to be great.
I am not saying no one does live music nowadays, quite the contrary, just saying that a lot of great music comes from people who never do live music, and that is because they can afford the luxury of 'editing' (which is kinda similar to divided attention span). Similarly, for the baker once the bread has gone bad there is nothing they can do but to start over, and that would be the incentive to get everything right.
I think we used to strive more for perfection. Changing sheets, ironing, folding clothes.. But also in trade, just look at all the ornaments.. attention to details, caring for tools / materials. When was the last time you got a suit made?
At some point we compromised and slapped a shiny finish on it. I blame advertising.
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.
What happened in the past is that you obtained good enough with a lot more hours and effort then now. And perfection, however you define it, was even further out of reach.
Until I started training for a half marathon. Not having run seriously in my life, I challenged myself to join my friends for a 10K last year. The training was an unexpected lesson in humility and thought - I could not go for the 10K regardless of how motivated or pumped up I was. I needed to train myself to get there properly… 2 KM on day 1, 5KM by day 15, and 10K by day 30 or so. With enough rest in between. I could do the 10K last year happily.
This year I am training for the 21K. I’m practicing for 3 months slowly improving my pace and endurance.
I’m not what one would call athletic. I’m still doing it and it makes me incredibly happy.
The analogy I went for is - the same applies to learning anything new, or mastering something- it takes time, and continuous effort. Not instant gratification. It sounds very logical and simple in hindsight, but I had to learn it as an adult now.
I don't think we should dismiss things based purely on the source, but caution seems warranted (as always, I suppose.)
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 for over one year, but it's impossible.
Dead Comment
I really wish I could appreciate these great human achievements in the arts, but at least for books, I don't think my tech-atrophied brain has the ability.
For example, I have never read "The Sun Also Rises," but I looked at the sample on Amazon and came across this on the second page: "I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face..." After a few matter-of-fact paragraphs, the narrator suddenly slaps the reader with this frank and funny statement of his utter cynicism. That kind of thing pulls me in. I want to know more about this narrator and see what other shocking things he may have to say.
I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication...
[1]: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/....
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Backgr...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Backgr...
> Still, the book sold well, and young women began to emulate Brett while male students at Ivy League universities wanted to become "Hemingway heroes." Scribner's encouraged the publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American phenomenon"—a celebrity to the point that his divorce from Richardson and marriage to Pfeiffer attracted media attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Reception
There's just no way a similar book written today could have this impact.
I can't say what constituted "most film" in 1926 (are we going by what sold the most tickets? big blockbusters versus daily newsreels & cartoons?) but if you look at the era of 1925-1927 it includes Phantom of the Opera, Battleship Potemkin, The Vanishing American, The Bat, Metropolis, and Wings. Many of this list is iconic to this day to where they continue to be referenced & emulated in pop culture that many people recognize even if they haven't seen the originals before.
Granted this discussion will be hamstrung by how much film has been "lost" with so much of that content no longer in living memory at all (to say if it was masterpieces or crappy filler).
Also, you don't have to read literature or novels. Read the narratives and nonfiction around what people experienced in times and places that will never be experienced again, and that youtube and netflix don't care about. Read about thoughts and reasoning that exceptional and forgotten people had in the 19th century that are ripe for rediscovery.
The death of attention span is real, but the idea that the substance of "content" now is of better quality than the writing in 1890 is a slander. It's just the difference between a quick, tasty, and a bit vulgar value meal at McDonald's vs. an actual high quality meal. The laziness gets addictive.
You could study some people who have gone to prison and have little opportunity for endless media consumption.
Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a button like you're living in a World's Fair crossed with Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired as early as you do if you don't do those things. Live like it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd have guessed?
Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working adults who need to Get Shit Done at night and zero other people you know are living on that kind of schedule—plus, Winter nights are way too long—but it worked. Sun goes down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by—and you'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and fast, time to go to bed.
Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with, while I was trying it.
Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another perspective on ordinary modern life.
Contrast, for example that either of these books' narration allows a reader to fill in a lot of the blanks with experience, both real and imagined, constructing it for themselves even down to the temperature of the air, shade of light at dusk, smell of the air, exact tone and pitch of voice of a speaker. Vs. a video where the experience is fully narrated and scenes presented in 4k. Is the video 'more digestible' because it's a different thing being digested?
Not that these tables can't and often aren't reversed. Some vloggers say little, sometimes 'scaffolding' only some understanding through a bit of backstory, or allow their audience to similarly construct experiences of the pieces of a journey. And some books are instruction manuals, or unintentionally read as so.
A tool, be that video, text, audio, game, is only that. It's just a medium, a method that's surface to the deeper world view of the 'maker'.
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 modern author would have had one and would have produced a better book.
In fact, why shouldn't modern books be better? Nearly everything else is (compare central heating to a fireplace), and the rest disappear once you account for the price you pay for it.
And I fully empathize with your difficulty in appreciating such works of fiction. Maybe I ought to try reading one this summer myself...
For me, the short answer is: it depends. Somtimes, I do have a short attention span--I'll start watching a video but then also look at the comments and suggested videos at the same time.
But if I find a truly interestng article or video, I will give it complete attention, even if it's a longform article or a half-hour documentary. I listen to hour-long lectures and podcasts.
What I don't like about this entire phenomenon is that people saw attention spans were declining and then decided to create stuff that doesn't require much attention.
I think instead of creating more short content, we should have made it scarce. People will consume what is available. There is much more short-form content available today than it was 5 years ago, because social media turned it into an advantage.
We should have continued creating long-form content. People would have paid attention to it if that was the only thing available.
I'd also partly blame the idea that you must be reading a lot, watching a lot, keep up with everything, and in general get more things done. So people turn to summaries and bullets, just to avoid being "left behind."
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...
(Sorry, haven’t yet checked out your work)
Various other assertions in the post also have sub-script confidences associated e.g. "my guess: yes90%".
I could totally believe that there has been a 65% decline in attention span. "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari certainly makes 65% seem conservative!
Perhaps the submitter's attention span ran out.
1. It will definitely rain, on 75% of the relevant area.
2. It will definitely rain, for 75% of the relevant time period.
3. It will rain with an intensity of 75% of the maximum our instruments can measure.
4. Three out of four meteorologists think it will rain.
5. It will rain on 75% of the population.
6. It will rain on everyone, but 75% of the population forgot their umbrella.
7. It will rai
8. 25% chance of dry.
9. 25% chance of snow.
10. When you become trapped in a Groundhog Day-type loop and are forced to repeat today three more times, then a subsequent analysis will show that it rained on exactly three of the four total days. Probably.
> It seems likely to me that individual attention spans have declined (I’d give it ~70%), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the decline was relatively small, noisy & dependent on specific tests.
It's definitely not black and white.
It's also worth noting that Johann Hari has an extensive history as a liar.