Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged.
Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.
The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.
I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers are doing to keep students engaged and feeling motivated by what they do.
Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough.
All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.
At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.
I disagree. A business isn't a summer camp or a YMCA, and while schools should obviously help a student to find their own way, it also exists to instruct without the teacher being required to act like a tik tok influencer in front of a class of 30+ students.
What with the constant infantilization of employees or students in US? My boss or my teacher aren't there to entertain me like I'm in a daycare.
The methods of engaging me employed by modern video games and fast-cut video platforms seem off-putting to me. More importantly I don't see how we can do anything meaningful when communicating like this. Life is largely search, not only exploitation of rewards.
If I was a teacher maybe I'd come up with some strategy, probably a compromise, but don't treat it as a thing they don't do just because they're lazy. It's like expecting that all people will deal with smog by designing and building their own air cleaning devices.
If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube.
The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1].
Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80.
Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see).
I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends.
There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication.
Everything else has been in the single digits.
So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale.
But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODjTBPPAFg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoSotRRVqg
Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better figure out how to learn what you need to know, whether it’s engaging or not.
As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.
The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
I'm familiar with hard work and struggle, having come from nothing. In fact the only thing that was handed to me was values around education and how important it is - I still believe in that deeply.
I still disagree with your framing.
Let's take this example:
> As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.
You don't see the problem here? Losing talent is not a winning strategy. If I'm a company leader, I take it as MY responsibility to create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work? There is none. Having employees that are working purely from a place of fear and not being able to pay bills is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
In short - I will bet against your version of leadership any day. I think it's anti-leadership and I would love to have you as a competitor company.
> The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
I don't disagree with you here. We're in complete agreement. I just think this point gets over-emphasized and my original point doesn't get talked about enough - which is why I originally commented.
> Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot.
Also want to respond to this. I agree with you here as well. However I think there is a distinction between school and education. It is the environment of school that I'm talking about in particular and the way some subjects are taught (History is a pet peeve of mine. As an adult, I LOVE history and learning about history - I do it in my free time. In school, history education is fundamentally broken IMO).
Working towards goals that are meaningful doesn't mean that you will be entertained and engaged with fun things to do all the time. Often quite the opposite. Personal growth and bettering your life also entails doing things that may not be very engaging.
If you focus on attracting people who want to be engaged and spoon fed and will refuse to do any work that they don't find immediately rewarding, sure, I'll be happy to compete with you.
When I say engaged and meaningful - I mean it in the purest sense of the words, whereas you seem to equate it to "unserious".
Back to concrete questions: Are business leaders and educators presenting problems in a way that people connect with and see the value of? Are they providing an environment that makes people want to work hard and makes them feel empowered to take on difficult challenges?
Take History education for example. I'd say the answer to the above questions are "no".
* Most students who take a History class in a typical American school don't see how memorizing dates for tests connects to anything meaningful in their life or understanding of the world.
* I'd say educators don't or can't spend much time or effort connecting the dots or presenting information in a way that inspires people to ask deeper questions.
Instead, the focus is on rote memorization in preparation for flawed standardized state tests which themselves serve as the basis for obtaining federal funding to run the school itself.
Not to mention teachers themselves are underpaid and under-resourced while the students are forced to wake up at 6am (often not getting enough sleep) to catch the bus, sit in uncomfortable chairs for 8hrs a day with no agency, and then we're surprised that they're not excited by people talking at them all day?
Put another way, let's say you show up to a restaurant that serves shitty food, has a shitty environment, and the server get your order all wrong - you pay for this with your time and money. Do you think it's reasonable for the head chef to complain that customers are ungrateful and should be happy they got food at all? If the restaurant down the street takes the care to get all these things right, are customers entitled for choosing that restaurant every time instead?
Work is work and you can choose to engage yourself with it or not. Obviously, employers should not mistreat their employees, but ultimately they're all there to do whatever it is the business does and the point is to all succeed together as a business, not to nurture the personal growth of the employees.
If a server can't be bothered to make sure an order is correct the customer doesn't care whether the environment was sufficiently engaging or not, they only care about their order being right.
It's not that long ago that most people's "job" was growing enough food to survive. Nature didn't care if you found this fulfilling or engaging, you either did it or you starved. I can guarantee that if your life and your family's lives depended on growing enough potatoes to last through the winter, you'd be very interested and engaged in how to grow potatoes. It is an incredible luxury that we can even consider things like whether we feel engaged or meaning in our work.
There's meaning to be had in all honest work that serves a purpose. It's up to you to find it. If people are going to sit around and passively wait for someone to "inspire" them, they're either going to be very unsatisfied with their lives or fall prey to the first charismatic huckster that comes along. Nobody else can tell you how to find meaning in your life, you have to make it for yourself.
Now all the employees have moved on and we have a labor shortage. Now what?
If it’s really important, the people who want the job done will do it themselves or increase the pay enough for someone to want to do it.
When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.
I think eventually I found that these short-term sweets are quite unfulfilling in the long-term, and now enjoy less immediately-stimulating hobbies like fitness, reading, learning, etc.
Hopefully people can grow out of this as they age.
Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017:
> Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The faculty is expected to somehow drag them through the academic program until they manage to earn a passing grade. As a result, professors have lost hope and faith in the entire Academic Board process
And this is supposed to be the most prestigious institution in the armed forces, the people who will have nuclear weapons in their hands...Chilling. That's how the West ends up with leaders who do not know how to lead, reporters who do not report, officers who are clueless about real war, and diplomats who are incapable of being diplomatic
I've learned a lot more on YouTube than I did in a classroom, and I don't buy the idea that reading is somehow a superior form of learning than video.
She can also not write a 10-paged paper about shallow topics. I don't know what she can do tbh and I am really not trying to be arrogant or shitting on her. She uses her sister, who is smart but easily manipulated by younger sister with big pleading eyes, as a ghostwriter to pass all exams during Corona.
And she really isn't the only one. Some universities are incapable of guaranteeing a minimum baseline of quality of their graduates.
hmmm yes but its a different type of addiction. In video games you still had to pay attention and at worst you'd develop some type of muscle memory or familiarity with a level but you were still focused on the game for hours.
TikTok and other short term media seems to have disastrous consequences for the young developing minds. Your setting up your brain to focus in short bursts and it immediately expects a dopamine hit.
I think we are already seeing signs of this amongst the Z generation, mental illness and well-being is reportedly lowest out of all demographics, and its puzzling why policy makers aren't taking note of this.
If I wanted to make the young generation of a hostile nation weak, ineffective, this is how I would do it. Create something that appeals to them, and turn the into dopamine fiends. It's no different than creating addicts that relies on other substances but because nothing is ingested, this type of neural behavioral programming is not seen as urgent.
I'm glad I don't have kids, I would be so stressed out about them in today's world. It's a completely different environment than the one we grew up with.
There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate.
There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote it down.
It means we should be asking for more than anecdotes.
> There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not […]
We definitely are churning out geniuses of this caliber. The bar for being a famous genius is higher.
Does reason not suffice for the purposes of this online discussion? What is so hard to believe about the assertion?
I spent a lot of time around potential geniuses growing up, and what sticks out to me is how many of them had their lives all planned out by the adults around them before they were in middle school. If anything, I think the lack of those people is because we've decided original thought isn't a virtue in our geniuses: We'd rather stick them in labs and use them tweaking models than give them the time and resources to explore on their own.
They're also identified and sheltered early enough that some of them don't develop resiliency + become dependent on the accolades they get, which also pushes them towards taking safer options. Big, creative genius disrupts things, and we train our gifted to not rock the boat. Even trying to found a unicorn company and going the VC route to become rich has a 'set path' at this point.
I also would doubt our young Newtons and Einsteins are spending much time on TT, unless they're studying it. It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.
"I understand and now no longer care" is one of the most freeing feelings out there.
[0] https://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-mont...
I mean, theoretically, yeah. You could do the test if you had some sort of absolute tyranny over people, a ton of money, about 1000 babies to otherwise do nothing else with, staff to raise those babies according to the experiment, and the 20-35 years of time to wait for the experiment to conclude. I'm sure I'm forgetting some crucial variable to control for though.
But that test is never going to be run. Nobody has that kind of time, that kind of money, that lack of morals, nor that energy to devote to this. There isn't a review board on the planet that would allow for this to occur, for good reason.
[Though Beethoven—or any musician—may be bad example(s) to include here: music is a field that is much less objective in ranking quality of ideas compared to ranking impact]
I don't get the impression from talking to older folk that there's as much ADHD going around. You could argue this could be just due to awareness and older folk not getting diagnosed for it, but I think I'm pretty good at sussing out people with ADHD and similar disorders, and it's definitely mostly people my age I've noticed having it, at the very least my generation has more obvious and serious symptoms of it.
I love tech, screens and all that jazz, but I think it has a massive impact on the young brain in a way we haven't really fully studied yet, and even I'm fearing for my 4 year old nephews and their malleable brains, considering they've got access to the same type of tech I've been obsessed with, just at a younger age than me.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2492547.Medication_Madne...
I agree it seems more prevalent in your generation. We are quicker to diagnose with pills, perhaps due to their availability and our lack of understanding about long term effects.
I think tech really does have a bigger impact than we'd like to think, and certainly prescribing kids things like Ritalin at young ages when they're naturally a bit hyper definitely doesn't help either.
Yes, in some ways Asia has the opposite problem, not prescribing strong enough meds for emergency situations.
> certainly prescribing kids things like Ritalin at young ages when they're naturally a bit hyper definitely doesn't help either.
Yeah, I don't get this. Kids can't sit in class all day, with two parents working and too tired at home to bring them out after hours. People need exercise for their brains to work.
As a kid I would switch a lot, but God of War and the Devil May Cry series drew me in, for similar reasons to Vermintide these days. Was also partial to some Unreal Tournament and Quake multiplayer, I think highly mechanical games tend to work great for restless people like me since it's a good outlet for my fidgeting ticks!
Looks like it’s dropping anyway. Is there a more updated graph?
The reality is that there is a huge dopamine industry trying to fuel additive consumption including social networks and video games.
There is ongoing sociological and psychological research showing that decreased attention span is real.
Given ‘kids these days’ have been cited as being disrespectful to their elders for thousands of years[1], I wouldn’t be surprised if the attention span is actually different between today’s Zoomers and a teenage boomer/millennial/X.
In software sector, current ci/cd makes deployment and releases very fast and more often, as opposed to monthly/quarterly patches in the past. Newer technologies makes development faster and more efficient.
There are more contents being published than humanity can consume at a time. Messages are instant and distance is almost meaningless in face of internet. At the same time media providers are researching the best way to increase engagement.
the rudolph steiner/waldorf model is kooky in a lot of ways but one thing i do believe they got incredibly right is that they constantly have kids making actual things with their hands in the real world and all the technical concepts are buried within a grander narrative. also they let kids actually go outside.