I think it's telling that those in tech, including billionaire execs like Jobs, were/are very sensitive to the usage of tech devices by their kids. Addiction to games, news, apps, entertainment is real, but that's only half the issue. It fosters this itch where we can't linger on uncomfortable thoughts without instinctively grabbing our phone to be distracted. This include when we're trying to really go deep on a subject matter that could take a long time to grok.
I credit a lot of changes I made over the last few years to courses like Learning How to Learn (Oakley, Sejnowski) and books like Deep Work (Newport) and Mastery (Greene) in helping to bring me back to realize the importance of uninterrupted blocks of hard, focused work. That coupled with moments of quiet time away from devices so that I can let my mind kind of just wander and process life has made life actually more fulfilling.
I quit Facebook, Twitter, and only check Instagram once every few days. I'm not totally 'clean' since I'll still spend time on YouTube and Reddit during moments of frustration, but I think it's important not to beat oneself up when one 'cheats.' After all, it's not completely a new phenomenon. There's always been things like books, newspapers, TV, radio to distract our attention.
But maybe it just feels a bit different since some of the smartest people in the world are working everyday to make sure we're looking at the thing they're working on in a very calculated fashion. That plus the fact that sometimes it feels like you're supposed to know so much of what's going on in the world and environment around you. But really, so many topics are so much more complicated than a simple cursory look that it feels kind of fruitless to jump into it when it realistically takes hundreds of hours to truly understand it.
Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of rich people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what we would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any different.
> Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of rich people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what we would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any different.
Whether this is the cause or not, children of the rich do very well in life, regardless of the level of control freak
Still, what's more likely? Rich children doing better because of overcontrolling parents, or doing better because they have access to enough resources to resolve almost any difficulty they face in their lives?
That rings a bell. I can be laser-focused when something important is actually on the line - like, doing a high-visibility task at work, or studying for an important interview. Other than that, my mind seems to simply not care about the made-up human goals such "attaining mastery of a subject" etc. - it only focuses when survival is at stake. My subcionciousness may be smarter than I am.
Same for me,
if something is on the line i have a clear mind and i can concentrate uninterrupted even in noisy Environments.
Also if i am really passionate about something.
A good Horse only jumps as high as it must i guess
Sure. I think meditation has become popular specifically because we no longer just do "nothing" anymore, so people need to now dedicate time to doing nothing, just like we devote time to fitness. Evolutionarily speaking, I imagine humans spent vasts amount of time doing nothing over the past few million years - so one would think that it could be somehow vital to our physiology. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the near future that it's just as an important process as sleep for our mental health.
I suspect people in the past were mostly doing nothing in the company of other people (family, tribe), which is a social activity in itself, and thus very different than laying in bed and staring at the ceiling all alone (this is how I imagine doing nothing looks like for people without a family).
I agree with the sentiment, but the methodology here seems suspect to say the least.
I mean, in their own words:
> The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50 trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, from 2013 to 2016. They then calculated the time the hashtags remained popular and found that in 2013, a hashtag remained in the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours, but the figure had dropped to 11.9 hours by 2016.
It's based on how long a hashtag stays popular on Twitter.
That's not a good source of data for something like this. For one thing, it's bloody Twitter, a service where topics change very rapidly and posts are at most 280 characters long.
Not exactly an environment conductive to deep thinking or lengthy session times.
Secondly, it doesn't really show attention span declining as much as it does the over saturation of media nowadays. New stuff is coming out all the time now, whether its news, movies, games, TV shows, music, books or anything else. There's just more to discuss, and less time to discuss it.
Hell, in games alone, we're approaching E3 right now. In that timeframe, it's likely at least 100 new games will be announced across systems, and many more will have new trailers, concept art, fact sheets and other info released.
Popular hashtags on Twitter for games will probably change every few minutes as a result.
This research just showed that when more stuff is released/documented, popular topics change rapidly day in and day out.
(First, this article is not about individual attention span: it's about an increase in volume of content and the consequently dwindling amount of time the collective public has to dwell on a given piece of published content.)
Anyway, this brings to mind one good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion. We need more people to care about curation of what might otherwise be forgotten.
Not strictly a democracy of people, though, is it? There are opaque algorithms behind the scenes doing their magic, and moderators who step in and distort the "democratic" process; it isn't just about upvotes.
(In the case of HN, I'm not criticising this; in general I think it's probably MUCH better than it would be if it didn't have these non-democratic mechanisms helping to manage the site. I don't actually trust that "a democracy of people" can be relied on to make good decisions, in general.)
I don't know that HN is a democracy at all. I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day.
I guess having a check like that is a good thing. Take reddit for example, people usually post third hand articles because the primary source is probably a paywalled article from a proper journalism outlet, and posts are subjected to sweeping vote manipulation. It's not a cultural cross section either, the types of people who post on reddit are a vast minority; I wouldn't be suprised if it was less than 5% of users. And users of sites like reddit/HN are not representative at all of the country or the world really. These sites heavily skew towards the educated, high income, male, and white, so you miss out on a lot of valuable perspective if you only use these sorts of sites.
> "I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day."
I haven't observed behavior like this. HN does have dedupe behavior that prevents the same piece being submitted multiple times within some time frame. How this looks to the duplicate submitter is that upon clicking "submit", rather than creating a new submission, it redirects you to original. This could appear that it's getting submitted by some other account, but isn't what actually happened.
This article really isn't saying attention span is getting shorter ( or it's misunderstanding what "attention span" means ). It's that global interest timeframe is getting shorter ( aka how long a product or news is relevant is shrinking because we are getting more product, news, etc ).
"The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50 trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, from 2013 to 2016. They then calculated the time the hashtags remained popular and found that in 2013, a hashtag remained in the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours, but the figure had dropped to 11.9 hours by 2016."
This doesn't mean that attention span is shrinking. It just means that there are tons more tweets and hashtags in 2016 as there are in 2013.
Just like with movies, the article mentioned. It has nothing to do with "attention span" since Endgame is a 3 hour long film. It just means that the movie industry is producing a lot more movies/blockbusters and the time a blockbluster can stay at the top is limited because another blockbuster is bound to release soon after.
It's like in the past we only had the "classics" as college subjects. Now we have physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, etc. And the new subjects means that our attention span got shorter. Which is absurd.
I think human attention span got shorter, but the article isn't really arguing that or it isn't arguing it well. And I'm not sure if human attention span getting shorter is necessarily a bad thing. Why sit through commercials, intros and so much filler/fluff in most media? As long as you are able to concentrate on things that deserve concentration, nothing wrong with short attention span for fluff.
I think its ridiculous hyperbole to call this a global phenomenon if they are looking at tweets. Less than a quarter of Americans use the site, a proportion that skews educated/wealthy/white, and of all twitter users something like 8% of accounts are responsible for 80% of tweets.
So why is so much being written and thought and discussed about whats really just the rampant spam of maybe 2% of Americans? Probably because twitter has a ticker.
> In the scientific world, he says, it may be risky if researchers actively choose to study trendy topics that hit the headlines, but aren’t as important as other pressing issues that demand more time and effort.
I think scientific research has had its own trends for a long time now, though they probably are more local than what the author is writing about.
I can recall a conversation I had with an acquaintance at an APS fluid dynamics conference last year about how trendy the broad field of fluid dynamics can be. 5 years ago it was all about "dynamic mode decomposition" (which hasn't died yet but is on the wane) and now it's machine learning.
You can be confident a-priori that most machine learning studies in fluid dynamics aren't going to do much of value because their "training data" is deficient in some way, whether the number of data points or the variation of an important variable. (There are other problems as well but that one seems most accessible to HN folks.) These more fundamental issues are not well appreciated, probably because they are hard and not sexy.
It's a lot easier and more exciting to try $buzzword for $X. (If you've missed the trend you always could try comparing $buzzwordA and $buzzwordB for $X. One talk at a conference I'm going to next week fits this template!)
It doesn’t help that everything is now a landing page, people must be able to skim through. Long text is bad! Must convert to customer!
The internet has been commercialized to the point where it’s no longer exciting to browse. I stay on HN and mostly read reactions to posts without opening the post link.
Else...
The answer is less apps and device time. Even having an app to help with 'human downgrading' takes up brainspace and a lingering attachment to the screen and devices. Though I suppose since screentime/devices aren't going away any time soon might as well try to mitigate it a bit.
I spent some time on their website and found humanetech's strategy to be well thought out. They aren't promoting an app, but rather a "combination of thought leadership, pressure, and inspiration to create market demand and momentum for products and services based on Humane Technology principles".
Sitting back and doing nothing or promoting just using less technology doesn't really address the runaway train that many feel they are on. If they are able to actually effect any of the 1000 or so people who are positioned to make changes to these products, then it may make a dent.
In particular I think the Freedom app is pretty unique in that you can setup web and app blocklists and it is synced between devices when you have it setup on all of them. So you can set a focus time of 4 hours for example and the apps and sites (and entire categories of sites if you wish) you specified will be blocked on all devices, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android. Surely there are plenty of apps that do similar things but I think the integration of multiple devices is pretty killer as you don't need to manage each one.
The InboxWhenReady and Distraction-Free YouTube extensions I think are really useful too.
If I wanted to read or talk to someone, why on earth would I have the television on?
If it's on, it's because there is something I feel is worth my time and attention.
(One reason I broke up with an otherwise-potentially-serious partner some years ago was that she -- and her family, it was a familial trait -- seemed unable to be in a room for more than a minute without turning on a TV.)
In case this is a serious question and not a joke (unclear which it is) then he may be saying that older movies and shows had these longer intros that seemed normal at the time, but if you watch them again now they seem long and boring now. So that is one to show how your attention span has become shorter
You'd also watch a show one episode a week unless it was on reruns. It used to be almost impossible to watch TV for 4+ hours because at certain times of the day, absolutely nothing worth watching was even on.
I agree that the intro is kind of nutty in how long it is, I also think it’s a great part of the show. It really got me “ready to watch” and brought me out of whatever else was going on and into... Twin Peaks.
That being said, I only first watched the show in the last few years, early 30s. Would almost certainly driven me crazy earlier in life.
First, time in the top 50 tags is shorter in 2016 than 2013. Ok, but what increase in volume of tweets was there? How many more tags? If you have 1M tags vs 10M with a fixed top N (where N=50) and even though N is relatively small in comparison to the tool so we're talking real outliers, I think you'll find that absent any other differences time in the top 50 will decrease.
Second, why are we talking about "attention" with Twitter as our basis for comparison? The very nature of the platform is people saying shallow but catchy things who like the sound of their own voice finding an echo chamber to assert their personal identities by RTing said tweet. In what world was or is Twitter a forum for any kind of attention let alone debate?
Third, catchy phrases in books. Um... there is a long lead time between writing a book, having it published and getting it in the hands of people. Now you can get a tweet out to 100M people in several seconds.
Holding people accountable. Ok, good, something worth talking about. If we've learned nothing from the Trump presidency it's this: there's only so much outrage you can hold on to and every day there's another story about lying, some scandal, fanning the flames of racists who have never gotten over losing the ability to own people, etc and one story just drowns out the previous one. I'm honestly not sure how you deal with this problem but it's a big one.
As for seeking journalism with more background research and quality, it's been tried. People don't want it and, more importantly, they're not willing to pay for it. You also have media conglomerates who pose as "journalists" who are anything but. Like, oh I don't know, anything owned by a Murdoch.
The conclusion seems shallow. I'll just leave it at that.
I actually see this as a fundamental problem of human nature. Humans are inherently... tribal. We naturally stick to people like ourselves, culturally and even physically. That sense of belonging is a key part of social structure. Dan Carlin talks about this in his Hardcore History series on WWI (a 6 part series--30+ hours of content--called A Blueprint for Armageddon which is totally worth listening to) when he talks about the Armenian genocide. His point is that pretty much everyone is guilty of genocide in history. Not that that excuses it but we shouldn't make out that any particular example is an exception or something that we ourselves (or, rather, our ancestors) weren't guilty of.
What happened in Europe after the Renaissance was the idea formed of nation states. While this might've been loosely associated with some tribal identity, in time it transcended it and it resulted in a number of revolutions deposing an old order that was typically a monarchy: French, American, Russian to name 3.
Because this is what many of us grew up with I think we consider this normal but I question this assumption. It seems like it's more of an exception than the norm. Many say the US is increasingly polarized and there's a clash of cultures. While I won't disagree with that, maybe this is simply the people reverting to a more natural state of tribal loyalty. It seems like it's easy to fan these flames as many opportunists have and will.
So perhaps it's better to say that social media makes it easier for people to live in bubbles that affirm their own world views. And I think Twitter is largely irrelevant in all this.
I credit a lot of changes I made over the last few years to courses like Learning How to Learn (Oakley, Sejnowski) and books like Deep Work (Newport) and Mastery (Greene) in helping to bring me back to realize the importance of uninterrupted blocks of hard, focused work. That coupled with moments of quiet time away from devices so that I can let my mind kind of just wander and process life has made life actually more fulfilling.
I quit Facebook, Twitter, and only check Instagram once every few days. I'm not totally 'clean' since I'll still spend time on YouTube and Reddit during moments of frustration, but I think it's important not to beat oneself up when one 'cheats.' After all, it's not completely a new phenomenon. There's always been things like books, newspapers, TV, radio to distract our attention.
But maybe it just feels a bit different since some of the smartest people in the world are working everyday to make sure we're looking at the thing they're working on in a very calculated fashion. That plus the fact that sometimes it feels like you're supposed to know so much of what's going on in the world and environment around you. But really, so many topics are so much more complicated than a simple cursory look that it feels kind of fruitless to jump into it when it realistically takes hundreds of hours to truly understand it.