Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers.

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.

View on HN

Doesn't mean it's not true. 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 suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having so many easily accessible forms of distraction on hand may well be part of the problem.

> Doesn't mean it's not true.

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.

But what made the likes of Newton/Einstein/Beethoven etc. stand out is how much they achieved given the limitations of the times they lived in. The reason I picked those three is all of them were known for being able to devote huge amounts of dedicated time to their specialty (Newton especially, who from memory developed most of the ideas in Principia while under effective lockdown during a smallpox outbreak. But unlike those of us under lockdown in recent years, there were no electronic gadgets distracting him either.)

We have geniuses like the inventor of CRISPR, penicillin, deep learning, etc.

Fairly sure Fleming didn't have anything like the distractions around now when he developed penicillin nearly 100 years ago! The other examples seem to be very much group efforts, and I'd be impressed if the average guy or girl on the street could name the key figures involved. It's possible we've simply reached a point where all the breakthroughs that realistically could be achieved by individuals have already been made, or that in the world of art there's simply too many artists able to readily share their creations with the world for individuals to stand out to the degree great artists of the past did. But I honestly don't know - it just seems that with so many more of us with access to resources and levels of education prior generations could only dream of we should be able to achieve a lot more than we have been.

It's much easier to be a polymath when the subjects are an expert in are pretty relatively unexplored. Today people spend their whole lifetime studying a deep branch in a single field, because the tree of math/physics/bio etc.. is much much more explored.

>"It means we should be asking for more than anecdotes."

Does reason not suffice for the purposes of this online discussion? What is so hard to believe about the assertion?

We're not producing celibate boys

Strongly disagree on distraction being the cause.

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'.

> 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.

Woah, woah, who says we're not churning out geniuses? The rate of scientific research is doubling every ~18 months[0]. The arts have had an explosion of growth and creativity in the last decades. Some of the best musicians ever are currently living. Some of the greatest revolutions in science are currently on going. I mean, we got the vaccine to covid worked out over a weekend!

[0] https://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-mont...

Sure, there are plenty of people born these days who presumably have the capacity for genius of the greats of the past. And yes, the sheer number of scientists working today, with access to knowledge and facilities far beyond what was available centuries ago is producing a stream of research and increased scientific understanding that is far greater than it's ever been. None of that invalidates the hypothesis (which is all I'd call it) that there'd potentially be more stand-out geniuses if we didn't live in a world with so many distractions available in devices we carry around with us all the time.

Wait. How can you disentangle the distractions of the world we live in from the result that there are more top-tier people working today? Saying that the variables are independent isn't enough. I'd say that the null hypothesis is that great communications technology is the root cause of both distractions and more 'geniuses'. You can't have one without the other to my eyes.

It's a testable hypothesis if you can get enough people to agree that their kids should be banned access to all such distractions (and such a ban to remain in place into adulthood). Obviously they'd still need access to electronically available information. Whether discussion forums/messaging apps count as distractions might be a grey area. I honestly don't know what the result would be, or how long it would take to determine the outcome one way or another.

That doesn't really sound testable to me.

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.

Agreed, it's not practical or particularly realistic - I don't think 1000 would be enough either. Maybe 50k? I'm not sure we'd like the results we might get either!

Alternative (but not exclusive) explanation: the easy pickings for geniuses have been picked over, and it takes longer than before to achieve genius-level accomplishments as a solo prodigy. Neither Einstein nor Beethoven contributed to multiple fields like Newton or Leonardo DaVinci did.

[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]

Beethoven's influence on the Western classical music tradition isn't disputed by any expert in that field - it truly was outsized and unmatched by any other individual composer. I'd accept the Beatles probably deserve the same recognition re popular music. It's fair to wonder how transformative they would have been if they'd existed in an era of Tiktok, Tinder and Snapchat.

Beethoven (or the Beatles)'s influence was not what I disputed. Rather, I dispute the assumption that the fact that they are the most influential automatically means they are also the best or most innovative.

I don't see it as a debate about "best" or even really "most innovative", just about individuals (or pairs in the case of Lennon/McCartney) that achieved a level of greatness (in terms of what contributions they've made to human knowledge/creativity) that logically you might expect to see a lot more of today given the vastly greater number of humans in existence now.

I wonder if "levels of greatness" is a relative quantity. If fourteen living composers are objectively as good as Beethoven/Lennon/McCartney (as one may expect with a much larger population), none of them will be recognized as great as Bach.

Anecdotally as a zoomer ('98, so I guess that's technically just on the precipice of being a zoomer), I definitely feel like a lot of my friends and colleagues my age have some form of attention deficit disorder, myself included (I've got pretty massive ADHD, but it mostly doesn't affect me other than making me hyper to the point of being annoying to others around me with my constant fidgeting and shifting). It's not a small sample size either, and all of us have had technology as an extremely integral/central part of our childhoods. Hell, I've been playing ADHD-fuel video games since I was 7 years old and I continue to do so, I really doubt that was good for me lol

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.

Two issues may be at play here. Both tech and Medication Madness,

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 this is true in the US (from the stories I've heard/read about at least), I grew up in Southeast Asia though, there isn't much of a culture for over-prescribing (or prescribing anything really :p) people medication there. I've never even been medicated for my ADHD, and only 1 or 2 of my friends have as well and that was well after they turned 18.

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.

> I think this is true in the US (from the stories I've heard/read about at least), I grew up in Southeast Asia though, there isn't much of a culture for over-prescribing (or prescribing anything really :p) people medication there.

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.

Curious, what video games?

These days Vermintide 2 with its endless hordes and mechanical skill ceiling have been drawing me in (around 700 hours clocked so far). Feels like a game tailor-made for people with ADHD, considering there's barely a millisecond of gameplay with no action, at least on the higher difficulties

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!

If you cherry-pick anecdotal complaints from the last 3000 years you can claim "People have been saying that for centuries" for any topic you want.

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.

All of a sudden everybody has short attention span but books sales still didn't drop to zero.

http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/1159.jpeg

Looks like it’s dropping anyway. Is there a more updated graph?

Huh? Ebooks are still books.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com