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.
You can try yourself. Use the most short-form content media: either one of HN, reddit and tiktok for 8 hours per day for one week. I can guarantee you won’t be able to concencrate on anything after the one week.
How anyone could read that article, even just skim it, and come out thinking that it was presenting evidence that this is a well researched topic is beyond me. The entire point of the article is that they couldn't fine studies on the topic...
I doubt there are controlled studies, but you can probably make a reasonable hypothesis based on viewing habits at different ages. Old people in 1993 watched Bonanza reruns; in 2023 they’re hooked to the constant crisis of cable news.
Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen a shift in corporate comms as people gravitate to IM and text as opposed to email, driven both by habit and by avoiding accountability as email audit has become common.
Google is a terrible tool to find scientific research. Rather use Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) or some of the fancy new AI-assisted literature survey tools such as Elicit (https://elicit.org). I used both to find these result:
- Gen Z and Millennials in the Workplace: How are Leaders Adapting to their Short Attention Span and How Will they Keep them from Leaving a Qualitative Study (https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4800/)
- Short-term mindfulness intervention reduces the negative attentional effects associated with heavy media multitasking (https://doi.org/10.1038/srep24542)
- Caught in the Loop: The Effects of The Addictive Nature Of Short-form videos On Users’ Perceived Attention Span And Mood (http://essay.utwente.nl/95551/)
Disclaimer: this is not my field, and I only spent 15 minutes on this, so these may not be the best articles around. On the other hand, the post seems to mention quite a lot of research on this topic, so you could read that, too. To read more, check articles that cite, or were cited by, these. Also, for obvious reasons, there does not seem to be many studies available on long term effects.
Well, I can't give you a neurological point of view on it, but if you train an LLM to be great at handling a context size of 512 tokens, when you try to ask it to do a task which requires greater context length (or in this context - attention span), the responses become incoherent, scattered and perplex as hell.
Which I imagine to be what would happen to a human if they trained their brain to process information of a certain context length exclusively.
So yeah, perhaps your brain becomes amazing at processing succinct information that's been engineered to be short, to the point and has none of the subtext or subtlety that you could include in a larger context.
That being said, perhaps that's exactly the kind of mental capacity you need for high context switching professions, I'm not sure which those are yet, but I'm sure there has to be someone in the world that has a use for that.
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.
A "neat" thing is that this exact same behavior is present in adults. Numerous studies have demonstrated a negative impact on focus (and other factors) when a person's phone is in their vicinity, even if it's completely inactive. I'd hypothesize it's our bodies becoming somewhat acclimated to the little micro-dopamine bursts you're going to get each time you get a bzzt, brrt, beep, or other sort of "engagement" (read: addiction) optimized notifier letting you know that something has happened. Even just seeing your phone, your body just starts anticipating it, and waiting for its next hit - in the same way your mouth may begin to salivate when looking at a delicious plate of food.
I suspect we'll look back at this era we're living in, the same way we might look back at the 19th century. In the 19th century cocaine started showing up in just about everything. It was used in medicinal tonics, casual drinks like Coca Cola (cocaine + kola nut), and more. People would use it recreationally, employers would give it to their workers, inventors and others (among them, Thomas Edison) would use it to improve their productivity, and more. Given the dramatic side effects of cocaine, people certainly realized there was a problem - but inertia is one hell of a beast.
Small kids struggle with focus, and here it's a good thing: they work to expand their environment and explore.
And, yes, you're totally right: too many toys and other things seem to exist to exploit this in the name of keeping kids quiet for a couple of minutes and extracting money from guardians. Not to mention the excessive use of tablets and screen time for kids under 5.
But I'm talking about something somewhat different: I know quite a few 17-19 year olds that genuinely want to absorb information, but literally cannot hold focus through a 15 second interruption. This is way more prevalent now than a few years ago, and it seems to be the students who are obsessed with short-form video that struggle the most.
I think all the things you're mentioning are relevant, but the big thing is that with mobile devices and short-form content we've created an environment where distraction never lets up. Most of us had to learn to be bored during some of our summer and sit with the feeling: that opportunity doesn't really exist now for youth.
Something I've learned from raising children is that the behaviour patterns the children follow are ultimately the same behaviour patterns us adults follow too. We just like to pretend that we know better or have overcome the childish instincts, but in many cases we have not. We act exactly same way and then come up with some bullshit excuse for it after the fact that makes it seem like we are not exactly the same species of monkeys acting on instincts like our children are.
Regarding your point 5. Gifts are a slow form of cluttering that snuck up on me. Children have multiple occasions per year where they are expected to get gifts, often more than one from more than one individual, which leads to sometimes dozens of gifts per child per year, most of which they rapidly lose interest in, added to an ever growing pile. It is rude to throw away gifts once received, and donating comes with its own caveats and effort. Unless the gifts pile is actively and continuously curated it grows over time and clutters the house. By the time I realized what was happening, we had already lost the fight and old toys were everywhere.
We recently moved and used the occasion to declutter. We flipped the script and took only what we wanted: just the toys the kids still wanted, just the books worth keeping, just the clothes worth wearing, and so on. I would estimate we kept less than a quarter of the stuff in our old house. All that stuff clutters not just the house, but the mind as well.
I think we are on the right of the bell curve with our kids discipline (healthy eating, little screen time) but the picture you paint sounds miserable.
A sparse environment, no TV, simple toys, denying gifts from grandparents isn’t something noble.
Of course don’t let them eat cookies before dinner and sit on iPads all day, but there has to be some balance for everyone’s enjoyment and sanity.
> A sparse environment, no TV, simple toys, denying gifts from grandparents isn’t something noble.
Providing an environment conducive to personal growth IS noble. Of course it's not only a matter of removing damaging attention sinks, but also substituting those with more healthy alternatives, like books, activities, education, quality time with family, etc.
> 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.
Well, we're discussing a post that looks at a bunch of moderate-quality evidence in this area. Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to realize that attention span measures would be very important for us to have high quality control evidence before 2000.
So we have some moderate quality measures that say that attention span has become lower over time. And we have higher quality measures that show that low attention span is correlated to consuming short-form video. For example, https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8820
> our attention mechanism is so flawed it can be broken so easily.
In my opinion, our attention mechanism is very weak compared to the demands of academic study and modern knowledge work.
> In my opinion, our attention mechanism is very weak compared to the demands of academic study and modern knowledge work.
Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok.
Maybe the UX of a traditional science paper has to be reviewed instead of trying to fault the end user for not torturing themselves trying to ingest something that has UX from half a century ago.
To me the issue seems pretty clear. We got new information delivery methods that are significantly better and when going back to old methods we naturally get unsatisfied. Does that mean we are getting "dumber" as "attention deficit" memes imply or that certain fields are just failing to catch up?
We can simply accept that ingesting old data types will be more difficult for the new generations or update them to match new expectations. Either way this sounds like whole lot of nothing for most of us.
> Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok.
Some things take time. You don't perfect a painting technique, explore a family of variations in a musical theme, analyze a complicated social issue, or solve non-trivial equations in a 25 second slice.
The students that I'm talking about-- they can ask their peer a question that they're interested in learning the answer to, and then have their attention wander and lose state in the time it takes their friend to finish chewing. This used to be pretty rare; now it's distressingly common.
I'm all for multi-modality and different ways to present information. But most people need to develop the skills to show up and think deeply for >20 minute spans.
That's a very good point. I guess the real new problem here is learning to identify and manage different types of discussions and information exchange formats which can be challenging but totally solvable issue imo once people start working on it instead of pointing fingers and fear mongering.
> We got new information delivery methods that are significantly better and when going back to old methods we naturally get unsatisfied. Does that mean we are getting "dumber" as "attention deficit" memes imply or that certain fields are just failing to catch up?
the new delivery methods are not significantly better at delivering knowledge, but at diverting attention. They are engineered for that outcome, not for the information retention ability after a significant amount of time, or even for the comprehension of that information. So yes, as a result, the society is getting dumber, because our intellectual resources are rerouted to futile bits of nothingness.
Hard disagree with you. New methods are objectively better. One obvious illustration is that online books/websites are better than paper books at information delivery and teaching people in general. The "society is degrading" meme is as old as time itself and frankly it's getting a bit boring.
What kind of knowledge are all you getting from Tiktok? Technical knowledge? Philosophical? I thought the app was for lip syncing + lazy cheerleading and the occasional Chinese data mining. But I am perfectly happy hopping on the bandwagon if it has substance!
I just use all the various sites as tools, instead of having loyalty anywhere. Search for something you're interested in and see what shows up. YouTube is definitely no longer the central repository of everything that it once was. A good way to demonstrate the average difference between YouTube and TikTok is to show the same video from the same guy, but optimized for different platforms. This is a video on deadlift form (in weight training):
No idea what the deal is, but I'm guessing the YouTube algorithm is optimized for longer form videos so a lot of stuff ends up with just a lot of filler. The TikTok video is everything in the YouTube video, but with all the fluff removed. I've also used TikTok for foreign language lessons with excellent results, largely for the same reason. The videos tend to have a lot better information density than what YouTube optimizes for.
----
Also, just watching that YouTube version again. Perhaps one of the best things is no more "If you like this video be sure to like, subscribe, and comment below. It really helps the channel out." An algorithm that relies on such a stupid, gameable, opt-in metric is always going to be inherently dysfunctional.
The “meta game” of optimal length on YouTube has been shifting towards longer videos for quite a while - one of the more important metrics towards monetising is “watch hours”. So you get a lot of filler.
YouTube also has shorts, which it measures somewhat differently (as views as opposed to watch hours).
Great links! Thank you for this comparison. I am a huge fan of spreading content across platforms as to avoid a monolith. I will be looking in to this Tiktok. And I truly cannot stand the "smash the like" whatever every. single. damn. video.
It's a totally under rated platform imo - there are a lot of high quality creators!
In particular I'm following UX (@designertom), CX and design channels as I'm still transitioning from backend to full stack development. Tech news, Producthunt-like content (especially in bleed edge areas like AI), art stuff, technical gardening (@transformativeadventures), science stuff (@hankgreen) and health/workout (@dr_idz).
The initial problem with tiktok is that you need quite a bit of time to train the algorithm to actually give you the stuff you want as the search and other discovery areas are really bad on purpose.
Also worth noting that Tiktok now supports long form content so some video can get pretty long. The player also has 2x video speed and good seeker so it's easy to roll through a lot of information very efficently!
I use it to figure out AI image techniques. Basically the theory is in papers, the nearly accepted stuff is in blogs, but the people on cutting edge are in youtube and tiktok trying 100 things before they can post 1
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.
Yeah, I have the same experience with retention. The extra time spent on the detours helps to contextualise the theory. To expand on your flowers analogy, looking at the flowers helps to remember the path better.
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.
I studied quite a bit of latin in high school (not in the USA through) and I have to say I'm not overly impressed by the test. It certainly doesn't test for fluency in Latin or Greek, most of the exercises are purely about grammar. The exercises that do require translation skills, don't require any vocabulary either. The sentences themselves are quite long, but latin grammar lends itself to complex run-on-sentences.
I think the better students in my class would have done quite well on this test even through latin wasn't one of their main subjects.
The Greek portion seems fairly similar if not a bit easier.
Every single history question is about ancient Rome or Greece.
Every single geography question is about the location of rivers.
How does this constitute an "exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world"?
The maths section does seem to have some difficult parts, we didn't do any proofs in the regular high school curriculum for example. The other math sections just show how much the requirements have shifted, a lot of the exercises in the arithmatic section got replaced by calculators, but I don't see any calculus on this test.
Looking at this, I think today's Harvard students are more educated overall than the ones in 1869. Our priorities just shifted.
I have to disagree. Your example illustrates that the quality demands of Harvard entry have declined and it's reasonable to assume that other universities have also become more open, as you claim. You're right about that. Universities are less elitist than they used to be.
Nevertheless, the overall demands in higher education have increased tremendously and the courses have also become more focused. In most disciplines, what formerly would have counted as a Ph.D. Thesis is nowadays at M.A. level. I've been in committees for hiring postdocs and Ph.D. students in the humanities, and it's insane what kind of demands are put on the students. I know some center of excellence in my discipline that (unofficially) requires one publication in a good international journal to be taken into consideration as a Ph.D. student. The majority of postdocs who apply for a one year grant nowadays have CVs that would almost certainly have made them assistant professors 30 years ago. There are also more courses and more subjects to learn because progress in science has accelerated very rapidly. For example, someone who studies CS nowadays will learn proofs in complexity theory that used to be cutting edge research 40 years ago.
Overall, I don't buy your negative claims. Over-achievers can quickly finish their undergraduate studies and will move on. At most universities it is possible to cram your curriculum and exams and pass "easy" undergraduate courses very quickly. Lack of elitism is an imaginary problem, probably often made up for political reasons. If you want to see real problems, look at the high student fees, accompanying debt, and the resulting desire to focus on practical job skills and overly fast-paced studies. These are detrimental to science, of course.
Why would you call it elitist? From my perspective something like this is the ultimate 'democratization' of education. If you can pass the test - you're in, regardless of who you might otherwise be (or not be). For instance one individual who would have passed a similar exam was Richard Greener [1]. He was the first black man to graduate from Harvard. He did so in 1870, shortly after the Civil War, for some social context. He would, unsurprisingly, go on to lead an extremely distinguished life. Passing the test would obviously require a rigorous dedication and pursuit to academic knowledge, but what is that if not the most pure definition of what college ought be?
I didn't talk about democratization (why the scare quotes?). I called it elitist because it's elitist. Harder entry exams are a way to only allow higher education for a much smaller percentage of the population, i.e., to an elite. You're obviously not one of them but there are people who think that the largest percentage possible should benefit from higher education. This also requires it to be affordable economically, of course.
I understand that this idea is not necessarily appealing to elitists and to people who only consider education in terms of the economic benefits it might provide.
The scare quotes as I think that's an inappropriate, though common, use of the term.
Rather than argue I'm quite curious of your take on something. Imagine we have a hypothetical individual - Bob. Bob comes from a single parent and poor family. He's the first of his family to attend college. Bob, like most kids doesn't really like school at all. But he eeks by. And he graduates. Having no clue what to do with his life, he decides to whimsically apply for Whatever U, where he's accepted.
Once in he looks for the easiest major - and settles on psychology. Made even easier after noticing all the cute girls in Psych 301. Bob squeezes by mostly using pickaprof, ratemyprofessor, and so on sites to just find the easiest profs who pretty much hand out 4.0s for just showing up. So naturally he ends up a solid 3.0 student. Finally he graduates.
From my perspective, he's now in pretty much the same situation as he was 4 years ago, except now he has 6 figures of debt and a sheet of paper. How would you say Bob has benefited from higher education, in concrete ways? Would you expect his life to be better or worse relative to him just deciding to e.g. pick up an electrician apprenticeship out of high school?
> 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 ?
They should definitely read whatever interests them so when they want to acquire useful knowledge (like what to do when the obvious brake cable fix doesn’t work), they have access to tons and tons of written material on that topic.
It’s odd how you’re acting like you’re making an argument against the general imperative to read books, but your examples are people being requested to read specific books which may or may not be useful and/or interesting to the reader.
> like what to do when the obvious brake cable fix doesn’t work
The interesting thing: those useful information probably aren't seen as "books" even when they're in written form. The obvious example is the repair manual in PDF on the brake maker's site. Or the blog explaining how they dealt with their vintage bike's brake cable.
Of course that information is probably actually a youtube video (I refresh every single components of a bike with a toolkit from amazon and hours of youtube videos with Shimano's PDFs on the side)
> It’s odd how you’re acting like you’re making an argument against the general imperative to read books, but your examples are people being requested to read specific books which may or may not be useful and/or interesting to the reader.
You're right. I should be clear that I find the very premise of pushing people to do a category of activity pretty odd. I wouldn't tell people to "go watch internet videos" or "go study academics" or "do some sport". If I'm close to them, such a generic advice would be dumb, and if I don't know their life, I shouldn't be throwing random platitudes at them either.
From that point of view, "read books" doesn't make any sense, and If I had to say something I'd come up with an actual thing that could benefit them.
The same way I'm kinda wary of people explaining they read X books a month. This feels like they don't see books as individual items, but as a KPI, which is weirding me out.
I think it's a decent point. Maybe we generalise from "the sort of people who read books" suggesting it's something virtuous. Or we have certain books in mind (rather than trashy romance novels).
Reminds me a bit of the idea of tea drinkers as some cultured ideal.
You’ve snuck in another conditional: when you’re close to someone, correct, you shouldn’t offer imperatives like “read books.”
You’d ideally be recommending books that are tailored to their needs and interests (which, remember, is not the same as your prior examples, which were specific books pushed on people regardless of their needs and interests).
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single decent educator who disagrees with you, though it’s easy to come to the idea that you’re contrarian on this point.
There are two factors: 1) educators have to suggest a small set of books for a large group of students due to the scale of mass education. AFAICT almost every educator regards this as a problem but it’s not exactly helped by views like “reading books is a dumb goal.” 2) when educators are talking about overall goals and policy, they obviously cannot say “well for person X we want them to read book X; for person Y we want them to read book Y, etc.” This washes out as “we want students writ large to read books writ large.”
The overall objective is to build a baseline ability for every student to be able to find, navigate, and interpret information. A lot of our society’s information is stored in a particular format called “book” that is navigated differently from other formats. Despite the generic-sounding imperative to read books, it is self-evidently the case that the only way to achieve it is by meeting each individual student where they are in terms of both skill level and interests, so that’s what educators try to do. Again: this is extremely challenging in mass education environments!
Other information formats should be and are also part of a good educational system, obviously, including manuals and instructional videos. I have clear memory of manuals and cookbooks even in my early education, which was low quality by US standards.
Agreed re weirdness of # of books as a meaningful metric, and I suspect most educators would agree with us as well.
I agree with what you are saying. Much like a muscle, when you work out, you're not lifting weights so you can lift more weights later.
Your general strength is higher, so most physical tasks are easier. Same for reading, if you practice reading books and enjoy looking at the written word, then reading developer documentation doesn't seem as intimidating which opens more doors for you.
My counterargument would be about why you need to lift weights in the first place ?
Some people like lifting weight, sure. But if your goal is to carry injured big dogs in your medical center, you won't be lifting random weights, nor doing generic workout. And you might not even do that in a gym, you could as well train with healthy dogs and get an actual feel of their weight distribution.
For books it goes the same. Reading stuff that will actually help you and bring you closer to your goals will help a lot more than reading for reading. On the other side you'll be able to go through thousands of page if the subject matters to you, where reading dumb prose will kill your attention in matters of minutes.
Learning to plow through uninteresting books for the sake of it doesn't sound like a worthwhile use of someone's time. But yes, just like workout, some people enjoy the effort in itself and like to feel the pain.
> Learning to plow through uninteresting books for the sake of it doesn't sound like a worthwhile use of someone's time.
Of course not, but that's just a very specific edge case of "go read books".
When I recommend for someone to go read a book, I consider it implied that they should find good, interesting and constructive books to read, not the opposite.
I personally think reading is as objectively good for the mind as walking is for the body.
Walking is objectively good and healthy for everybody and anybody, bar physical conditions and edge cases.
However, you could go walk in weird ways in boring or dangerous and unhealthy places and that's not ideal, but who would purposefully do that?
I think I see your point but 10% (or heck even 1%) of books being engaging and worthwhile is still more books than anyone could realistically read in a lifetime. Good books are a fair bit more accessible than good urbanism or rural activities are to a suburban kid (speaking from experience sadly), and I don't think people extolling the values of reading are suggesting doing it completely in lieu of other productive activities like fixing a brake cable (fwiw probably an activity better assisted by YT or maybe even TikTok than books).
I have tried fixing the brake cable on my bike (and other bike repair tasks), by using the myriad of youtube videos assigned for the task. It's actually quite difficult to hold a brake cable in tension, while forcing an old school front derailleur not meant for the bike into millimeter perfect position and at the same time pause/unpause/rewind a youtube video.
It is honestly easier to put a book down open to the right page, in line of sight. It requires no interaction and book authors are forced to write instructions that can be understood primarily without pictures, so there's no pause/unpause/rewind mentality. Books engage the mental tools to infer what happens next from textual description, an ability videos degrade in the viewer. The implications of that effects decision making subtly.
Books are also a welcome release from the trance-like state induced in consumers by most electronic displays.
I agree most books are garbage (like most of everything), the filtering of low quality books has failed. In my limited understanding most of the great literature was written between the 1700s and 1900s anyway. Recent literature does not grant the broad understanding and height over the subject matter.
It is somewhat problematic to rely on multiple youtube videos and find they all have 'small detail' gaps in their perfomances that exist because the video format is to train the user along a generic path of action. Those cracks often reveal a chasm of difference in understanding and in the end, the video is replacing turn-key parts and I'm angle grinding off a stuck cup and cone bearing, even though on the surface the problems look identical.
> It's actually quite difficult to hold a brake cable in tension, while forcing an old school front derailleur not meant for the bike into millimeter perfect position
Maybe you are missing the tension adjustment screws on the Bowden tube? You ajust the tension if the cable as close as you can with a pair of pliers with one hand, and a screwdriver to lock the cable in the other. The you use the fine adjustment screw to precisely align the chain over the cogs.
> 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 how would you judge the quality of 15 second videos? It's crucial to be able to push through that in order to make a good judgement if the content is any good. The inability to think and judge critically is a huge problem nowadays in my opinion.
How do I judge the quality of the needlessly long book? I would argue that 15 second videos are better for this, because I can easily watch a bunch of them from different sources to corroborate what I see. I can also research the quality of the video's creator, just as I can research the book's author.
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.
Though reading is more efficient, perhaps they just have more time to listen to audiobooks to the point it is more total information gathered. Multi-tasking for the win!
While I can utilize speed-reading techniques for some content somewhat faster than I can listen, it is an all-hands-on-deck situation attention wise and extremely sensitive to interruption.
On the other hand I can push 3x or faster depending on the narrator for audio content in most situations and 2x while doing nearly anything (the only exceptions being literally trying to carry on a conversation with a person or driving fast on a mountain switchback road).
I don't do "ordinary" reading particularly well due to my own brand of vision issues + ADHD/neurodivergence/whatever label is in vogue. This is a bit sad for me, but I've obviously got workarounds.
Depends on whether or not you have the time to read. Listening to audio books can be done while walking, vacuuming, etc. Also while commuting, where reading might cause motion sickness.
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?
Keep notes on the things i really want to keep, some details and random facts that happen to trigger my memory, and a general sense of the work with most of the rest of the details faded away. Also, you know, entertainment.
No I don’t have eidetic or whatever the version of that is for audio or text. Closer to it when I was younger than I am now. I have a feeling this is something you can train with effort but not exactly sure what that effort is or if I have the motivation to try it.
To remember the most out of reading you have to engage with the material. Keep notes while reading or after, try to summarize what you have read after each session of reading or at the end of each chapter or each day. Ask questions about the material. Physically write these notes and questions down, ideally with actual pens and paper. Additionally engage with other people about what you have read vocally. Reading, writing, and speech engage different but connected pieces of your brain. Engaging with material in multiple modes reinforces memory from multiple directions as does the practice of summarizing, questioning, and discussing. Gets you into somewhat subconscious habits of paying attention to material differently.
But also, not everything is worth remembering. If I need a recording of the material i already have it on paper or an audio file, it doesn’t have to be accessible to my consciousness from my own memory when it’s just right there easily found.
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.
True but the dev’s of the 80’s understood transistors and other things i never needed to know as a millennial. As these things get abstracted, complexity keeps increasing at the top of the stack so thats what’s keeps us employed (for now)
I see recipes Tiktoks get readily debunked in longer-form content, such as by channels like "How To Cook That"¹; the Tiktoks amount to little more than content farming. What real information might be present is drowned out by fakes and bad advice that exist for no other reason than to soak up eyeballs.
I get far more out of longer-form videos, IMO.
(And yes, the bloated recipe blogspam is also a form that is rapidly approaching 0 bytes of information per byte transferred.)
¹(even this is "cheap" content, IMO; debunking stuff leaves the viewer back where they started, although How To Cook That specifically will occasionally show the "no, here's how you actually do this, and it takes less time than the tiktok's "time saver"." There's an endless stream of junk to debunk, so you don't really have to worry about running out, per se.)
Any examples of fake tiktok recipes? All the top "How To Cook That" debunking videos seem to be about other youtube videos or just weird food videos that aren't recipes.
I follow some YouTubers that try to recreate TikTok recipes and most of them come out just fine. If you're an experienced cook, it's really easy to judge whether a recipe is gonna be decent or not.
I wouldn't call them fake recipes, but here is a youtube channel that is highlighting Tik Tok cooking videos, some of which seem to be just for the video... that is, I don't believe even the people showing those "recipes" are eating that.
That only works for dishes that are related or similar to other dishes you've made in the past.
As soon as a banana leaf, raw fish, etc etc enters the picture you'll want to read the long form. Also if you want to actually get better at cooking, tiktoks just won't cut it as there's no time to discuss all the nuances - and quality food is an amalgamation of many small nuances.
Doesn't sound very different from Grandma's recipe cards in terms of information density, potentially harder to follow if you have to deal with video playback. Recipe blogs also have compressed instructions, so it's not like you need to read all the fluff, but when first stumbling upon a recipe, a short video is definitely better at grabbing your attention and showing you the major points and the result, in a way that traditional blogs and cooking sites fail to replicate. Video is also better for conveying technique, but I prefer paper or cards while cooking something that's not completely new to me, for fewer handwashing interruptions.
> 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.
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.