Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

theguardian.com

150 pointsrzk114 comments

Reminder that Johann Hari has been guilty in the past of plagiarism, fabricating stories, and maliciously editing the Wikipedia pages of his critics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

Stolen Focus, like his other works, has been criticized for failing to cite evidence for some of its claims and for misrepresenting scientific studies.

That doesn't mean he doesn't have valid points about the attention economy, but I think we should have a healthy skepticism.

Thank you

Stolen Focus is an interesting book and worth your time, but it's absolutely set on making the case that governments need to intervene on social media and I don't think it did it very well. I wrote a longish review digging into why back in June but it will probably only make complete sense if you've read the book. https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/06/08/book-review-stolen-f...

Same with this article it seems. It's thought provoking. Worth the read. But the conclusion is rather underwhelming: it's an environment & societal problem. Also Big-Co is evil. That's not wrong per-say, but gee-whiz looks like we gotta add it to the growing list of how everything's terrible.

The message is good just missed an opportunity to carry over the energy into action. I'll try: since we can't change society so easily, perhaps change the environment as a microcosm? Talk to friends about it. Talk to family. Coworkers. Try intentional things like no-phone dinners. Heads down time. Maybe these things are just as silly. And it's especially hard to alter kids behavior because it's very hard to control external social influences.

One point that the article did land for me was the potential for individual change to be unhelpful. No-phone dinners only work if there isn't any sense of anxiety about not having your phone at dinner. That anxiety only goes away if you have an environment that allows you to unplug. Systemic changes like requiring workplaces to allow employees to have "off times" seem necessary to remove some of the baseline anxieties many of us have.

If you want to talk about kids specifically, then you'd need some way to alter the anxieties that affect them the most. Anecdotally, it seems like kids (teens especially) end up with lots of FOMO and loneliness. The only structural reforms I've seen suggested as solutions to those were much more drastic than the ones proposed for adults, like preventing teenagers from using social media at all.

> That anxiety only goes away if you have an environment that allows you to unplug. Systemic changes like requiring workplaces to allow employees to have "off times" seem necessary to remove some of the baseline anxieties many of us have.

Are there really so many employers requiring employees to be permanently on-call? I would only consider working in such an environment if they would be paying enough to retire in a few years.

This. And do they really expect employees to answer e-mails outside of working hours? To me e-mail is "slow" communication - if you need an answer right now, use a different channel.

I suspect yes. You may not see it in your industry, but I see it a lot in the creative space. Anecdotally, I know there’s an expectation when working for a video production company that you are constantly available to react to clients. And that since much of the work is contracted to people who work odd hours, being a producer is an always on kind of job.

As for how common it is? dunno, but there was a very funny (sad?) music video that hints that this is fairly widespread phenomena, for young office workers. Quarter Life Poetry, “Circle Back”. One of the final scenes is the narrator being unable to get away from the grind even at home.

https://youtu.be/XXt1-qEjKlE?si=ps3iSQZBVYMweN83

edit: warning slightly crass

Software developer here, also doing development support work at times. Still, in the last 20 years it never happened that I got a call from work, despite emergencies being pretty common. As it should be, in countries with strong employee rights.

When you don't pickup people stop expecting you to. Set your own expectations.

Thats an extreme example to me. I don't think I have ever had a phone dinner, unless we needed to show somebody a picture or take one (and both things are rare).

You can put your phone on a shelf and if somebody calls you, you can pick it up, or call them back later.

But that is the entire point - you alone can't do much about this. It's not an underwhelming conclusion, there is nothing else to say, really. The way to solve this is societal change, not tweaking around the edges with your behaviour.

> The way to solve this is societal change, not tweaking around the edges with your behaviour.

A single person can't change a society, but a single person can talk to 1-2 dozen people and maybe get 1-2 more people to talk to 1-2 dozen more.

The problem is that, in general, governments are also stealing your focus to non central issues and hide the core issues.

I really enjoyed Stolen Focus. But that's because I wrote a similar book the same year.

Some of the most thought-provoking resources on this topic in my opinion are:

- Amusing Ourselves to Death

- Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

- The Century of the Self

- The Shallows

- The Attention Merchants

- Much of William James philosophy

If anyone wants a copy of my book "Enough. Seeking less in a world of more." Send me an email and I'll gladly send you a free copy.

I would but I'm trying to cutdown on attention stealing devices.

It's ironic that you are trying to steal focus in order to tell others about how their focus has been stolen.

No different than this guardian article stealing focus to do the same with a book launch!

It's only stealing if something of value isn't being provided in return

This article was a tough read because of the meandering prose and weird personalization narrative they shoe-horned in.

> We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model

Cool that the Guardian flew this person to like 3 different locations for the story. Great conclusion. We could also solve poverty by giving everyone high paying jobs...

Tristan Harris is referenced in the article and I find his work on social media/attention to be very interesting.

> The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.

That's not a good analogy. We actually could do this, in the same way that society has banned various other categories of harmful products.

The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.

Point ceded on the analogy. The point I was trying to make is that the only solution was a flippant suggestion that we just "ask social media companies to change their business model". Leaving aside how difficult of a proposition that is, it would have extremely negative knock-on effects. These companies are roughly 50% of the S&P 500 top 10.

> The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.

Ya I mean 655K people died fixing that issue[1]

I admit I am being unfair here, but the trend of "identifying" an obvious and well known problem and writing an article about it, really frustrates me. We KNOW climate change[2] is a problem, we KNOW social media is bad, we KNOW that housing/living costs in much of the world are unaffordable for generations of people. I would appreciate at least exploring the surface area of what a real solution could be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

[2] Those that do not accept climate change still recognize that our key fuel inputs are finite resources. Thus we still need to make changes to prevent foreign wars, increased pricing and maintaining global progress.

I developed a pathological need to monitor Slack at all hours. It was largely based on the culture at my company (a startup, at the time) - while there was no written rule to install Slack on your phone, responding to Slack messages at 10pm was clearly a way to get ahead at the company.

I switched jobs and continued to run Slack on my phone, as everybody seems to do.

Some time in 2021, I got a new phone and just... didn't reinstall Slack. The world didn't end. I found myself just as much on top of things as I was, in spite of the fact that I was now making intentional visits to my laptop off hours (I didn't quit it entirely).

You're probably expecting me to say that this was rainbows and unicorns from there on out, but the exact opposite is true. Two years later, I'm still finding myself anxious much of the time, that I'm missing an important Slack message - sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at 6am. Sometimes I have, indeed, missed an important Slack message. Not having the capability to be notified instantaneously isn't a panacea. I'm only finding it better than the alternative.

There's something that never sits right with me with the constant status-anxiety go above and beyond, nothing is ever enough hustle/schmooze culture. Part of me thinks "hmm well that's how the most successful/high status people in society do it/favor so it must be the way things ought to be", but who knows. To me, it seems to maximize for the appearance of competence and relative importance, and thus favors political/aggressively social types over anyone with a reasonable desire for work life balance, and not just because they have the audacity to demand time to themselves, but giving your body/mind time to rest improves the quality of your work.

So I run a remote-first company and our team is all over the globe. We had some people (including me) who had this issue at one point.

I solved it by establishing two expectations:

1) No one is expected to be on Slack outside of their work hours. Full stop, pretty much.

2) Everyone must provide their personal mobile number to the company. They're all stored in an "emergency directory" (it's just a Google Doc). If there's an urgent emergency which can't wait until someone starts their next workday, you are allowed to call this number to reach them.

In five years there's been one call through that emergency system, I think it was a big customer getting hacked.

There have been many times where people just routed around the issue, like, "Oh, XYZ won't be available for the next 12 hours, I will talk to ABC instead and tell the stakeholder that I'll be able to get the expert engaged tomorrow" and it all worked out fine. Never been a big deal from what I've seen.

We lost half our revenue in a very short period of time during Covid - it didn't trigger a call. Why should it have? Very bad news, but learning about it at 10pm wasn't going to improve anything. People all got a good night's sleep and then woke up and saw the terrible news in the morning, probably for the best because they were refreshed and relatively prepared to deal with it.

Could you argue we're overall less responsive as a company because of this? Maybe but I don't think so, we haven't had customer complaints which would point to this. On the contrary we get customer feedback that our people thoroughly attentive to their needs. (Even with our customers we are clear up front about everyone's availability hours.) I do know that nobody is an anxiety zombie, and our people seem to be quite good at making rational and clear-headed decisions all the time, our company culture felt more panic-driven and knee-jerk before I instituted these rules. I'm pretty sure that allowing people to be totally unplugged for 16 hours a day if they want makes them better performers during the 8 when they're on the clock.

That's a really nice solution. I'm not sure if everyone would be on the same page handing in their personal cell number like that, but I'd consider it 'problem solved'.

Being able to tell a client when you can get back to them will go a very long way towards mitigating their needs. For them it may be urgent, but knowing when it will get someone’s full attention, I’ve found is often enough. It’s basically saying someone is on this, and it’s in their priority list. It feels almost magical every time I’ve done it. The trick is having someone who can triage at odd hours in a way that doesn’t purpetuate the problem of having people be on when they shouldn’t.

Stolen Focus (the book this article is an excerpt of) is a solid - if meandering - overview of society's rapidly declining attention span, featuring insight from behavioral psychologists, senior FAANG engineers, etc. It probably won't teach you anything new, but would make a great gift for the casual reader to get them asking questions about privacy.

It sounds like her son has ADHD (and her too likely as it’s mostly genetic), just like me and millions of others. No, it’s not an epidemic. Social media and phones in general are the perfect “solution” for brains that are in a constant craving for stimulation.

I don’t want to get into the whole personal responsibility vs evil companies dichotomy, but something that has helped me tremendously is wasting time on my own terms, not because I got a notification. There are days when I don’t receive a single email because I’ve aggressively unsubscribed from almost everything. Same for the notifications on the phone - if, say, Uber sends me a notification for a coupon for 50% off at Chick-fil-a, that’s an immediate banishment and the app can no longer send any. If that degrades the app experience when I do need a car, that’s their problem for abusing my trust.

From a practical perspective it’s definitely your problem if you need a car…

I can still get a car just fine by keeping the app open and seeing how far the driver is. The point is that some apps really do benefit from real time notifications, but it’s too tempting for PMs at those companies to not abuse it because of the metrics that they are evaluated on. Pretty sure the apps report back if the notifications are turned off so that’s my form of feedback into those same metrics.

There seem to be a lot of comments cluck-clucking about personal responsibility, and government intervention is bad, and the way this is written is off-putting, and-

And no acknowledgment about how many on here can't really give an unqualified opinion because of where their paychecks originate. I can, though, and here it is:

We've done this before, with cigarette companies, treating them with kid gloves and trying to avoid disrupting their business, and people kept getting sick and dying in droves until government finally acquiesced and committed to a full-court press. Laws making smoking inconvenient, and massive public service campaigns, and taxes, and more. You need to make a decision: are you going to continue building a livelihood off the suffering of your neighbors, and your family? Or are we going to do something about this, collectively?

I think 100 years from now, we're going to look back at Social Media like we currently look back on child labor and cigarettes. "Why on earth didn't we regulate it earlier?" All the signs are there that this stuff is terrible, but we plug our ears and pretend people are rational and will do what's good for them, and insist on treating corporations with kid gloves because stock market must go up. HN has a thick, libertarian "everything government does is bad" streak running through it and we sit at a position of great privilege--the privilege of being well-off techies, having agency over our lives and the ability and choice to avoid things that are bad for us. So you're not going to get much sympathy from this crowd.

It's really a pointed question, isn't it, but cigarettes, and alcohol, and gambling, and porn, these are recreational, optional pursuits.

The smartphone and social communications are something which have been woven into the fabric of society, into our daily lives, our recreation and employment alike, our consumerism, our interaction with everyone, from government agencies to next-door neighbors alike.

So unlike the dude standing in the "no smoking" section with a cigarette, this epidemic will require far more intestinal fortitude and introspection for us to ultimately confront as detrimental, and it will be far more difficult for us to extricate ourselves from its tentacles.

Let's get down to it, ban all the hazards, moral or otherwise.

Lets start with taxing porn at 50%, on both ends. Anyone overweight? Slap them with a $7500 fine per pound over the limit, based solely on BMI because that is the only measure that congress can agree is general enough for all citizens. Jail everyone who even thinks about smoking. Alcohol? Well, well, prohibition 2.0, drink once, get sterilized.

You need to make a decision: are you going to continue building a livelihood off the suffering of your neighbors, and your family? Or are we going to do something about this, collectively?

Cluck cluck.

Sure, just convince enough people and you can make all these come true. Isn't democracy great?

Do you want to ban phones in public or do you want to hit the social media companies?

Because I would really hate it if I had to not use my phone to take pictures and do direction and listen to podcasts because some people spend too much time on Facebook.

The second seems more cogent.

> Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a drip-feed of anxiety-provoking facts and trying to smush them together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day.

I really miss the newspaper as a daily thing with a front page, sections, and a finite set of articles. Online news outlets (not to mention social media) all seem to exist in an "infinite scroll" model of constantly rotating stories that never run out. To get the daily model, it seems like you have to order a physical paper, but that's less desirable on account of the waste and clutter.

For a brief time, I had the NYT sunday edition delivered to my house. I quickly discovered that the information was mostly useless to me, and it took way too much of my time to read all the way through.

I ended up subscribing to Delayed Gratification (https://www.slow-journalism.com/) as a sort of middle ground. I get a nice, physical thing I can read. I'm able to read about current events, and all of the noise is filtered out for me.

Was it really stolen or it's us who are constantly looking for content regarding stuff that happens 20,000ft above our heads? Maybe thinking that if we understand it then we'd rise to that level?

When influencers fail to answer questions such as the name of the President or the speaker of the House or the capital of Argentina people laugh at them.

I have come to realize that maybe they are in the right, they are extremely focused on what matters and pertains to their lives

If there is a need to fix things, maybe it is a job for the church, or whatever entity holds spiritual power where you are.

I say that as an atheist, but it is the kind of things an organized religion can achieve, especially a state religion. The idea of taking the time to appreciate the work of god, and not let the smartphones of the devil leave you astray.

A secular government may act on technical points, maybe by raising taxes, imposing strict work hours, etc... But religions can really get to the core of the problem by acting on morals.

Note that it is not a solution I would agree with personally, but I don't agree with heavy-handed government regulation either. I think it is something we need to learn how to deal with as it is the reality of a superconnected world, and governments (and religions) can help with that. Not something to fight against.

Secular governments are no less able or prone to act on morals than religious institutions (and nominally religious organizations are no less prone than secular ones to be tools for an elite to manipulate the masses in pursuit of the elite’s secular interests, with moral appeals as purely cynical tools of manipulation.)

All of these supposed revelations that companies try to make products that people will use were supposed to empower people to break free from these addictions

Yet anecdotally, these narrative seem to give people more excuses to engage further with their addictions of choice.

I’ve heard so many variations of “It’s not my fault I use so much (Facebook|TikTok|Reddit), don’t you know they have people employed to make them addictive!?”

The people I know who best moderate their usage are the ones who own their own choices, not the ones who blame everything on corporations.

> The people I know who best moderate their usage are the ones who own their own choices

Strikes me that this is true of any addiction.

Not just addictions. The kids I have coached that have the worst behavior always blame their mistakes and behavior on anything but themselves. Zero personal responsibily.

Agreed, the words personal responsibility are frowned upon nowadays since our priority is comfort and 0 judgement. You can choose whether to believe you are in control or choose not to. If you choose not to dont be surprised when you fail to achieve your goals.

Ah yes just choose it. Like you can just choose to be rich. Just do X or Y! Easy!

Good god, so many people here are basically being manifestation coaches. “Just believe you are rich and the universe will make sure you are!”.

> Like you can just choose to be rich. Just do X or Y!

The argument is in opposition to “just lie down and take it and whine about it on the internet”.

So you want to be rich but are not, you can either try to do things that will make you rich or just do nothing. One has a non zero chance at success and the other has zero chance at success

Also i get its not easy. Ive struggled with it myself and have been diagnosed with adhd and was only really able to live to my own standard after being medicated.

And im fine with living with cognitive dissonance around free will and such because i know this path will lead to me living a happier more fulfilling life.

Thesis just kids in general. They'll grow out of it or they won't.

The vast majority of heavy social media users don't meet the clinical definition of being addicts. Many of them have other mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, or neuroticism. But it's not particularly helpful to compare Instagram to nicotine or opioids.

In the words of Jack Sparrow, "Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest."

You can always trust a corporation to be a corporation. These days I'm frankly more surprised when I'm not screwed over.

In our modern society, everyone is a victim and it's always someone else's fault. My opinion that people in America do have choices and their lives are the sum of those choices inevitably elicits a lot of rather angry responses.

All the people I've gotten to know over the years are all where they are as a result of their choices.

The interesting thing about deciding to own your choices is it's empowering - you can choose to change your life. The victims, however, have unpowered themselves, and thus remain forever hapless victims.

For example:

1. Live in a bad location? Move

2. Uneducated? Education is free over the internet

3. Weak? Exercise

4. Overweight? Eat less

5. Drug addicted? Treatment is available

6. Criminal record? Start your own business

7. Unhappy with your finances? Learn how to invest

8. Your friends drag you down? Discard them

9. Hate your boss? Quit and get another job

And so on. None of this is easy. It will take effort. It's up to you.

Everything is easy if you trivialise it enough. This is why self-help books are America's #1 genre and literary export.

Real life, on the other hand, is a tad more complicated. The rule of thumb is don't waste time with people that think they have all the answers. Either they're lying to you, hopelessly naive, or have no real life experience.

> Drug addicted? Treatment is available

> Criminal record? Start your own business

> Unhappy with your finances? Learn how to invest

I mean, seriously? You forgot "poor? Become rich."

I specifically wrote it wasn't easy.

The "it isn't easy" is the bloody important part that none of your slogans touch upon, so they're not even worth the memory they're stored in. There is no insight to be gained from any of them.

Or do you truly believe that people with hardship in their lives are so hopelessly stupid that they don't know they will have to put some effort, instead of sitting around crying over themselves? Come on now.

> that they don't know they will have to put some effort

I wrote that because the usual responses I get are that it isn't easy. Thought I'd deal with that up front.

My dad used to tell me I wasn't afraid of hard work. I could lie down right next to it and go to sleep.

> Or do you truly believe that people with hardship in their lives are so hopelessly stupid that they don't know they will have to put some effort, instead of sitting around crying over themselves? Come on now.

I don't think that's what Bright said. Unless you're the type of person to say never take risks, because chances are you'll fail. If the world was filled to the brim with that type, then what's the point in living?

Don't tell me you actually believe in that.

I’ve been following the poverty finance subreddit recently. One thing that stood out to me recently was how often people who know they’re poor “waste money” on things that I would never spend money on. And the threads around it all seem to come down to some variant on this is my one luxury without it I might slit my wrists. Not all the sentiments are this extreme but I think it points to something in the human condition. Being poor is hard, and if there is nothing to look forward to, like what’s the point? It’s easy to ignore morale as a need, like sleeping and eating, but it’s there. And sometimes it’s more important to fill this need than to increase your savings rate by a negligible amount.

Responsibility does not mutually exclude. I'm a bit disappointed in a compiler engineer not being alive to the logic of that. So many political arguments (in both directions) based on this bogus reasoning, that A can affect an outcome, so therefore B who exerts influence on it has no responsibility. Doesn't work that way.

Since you brought up compiler engineer :-), I'll share that at the outset 100% of my colleagues and friends all said I had zero chance of succeeding writing compilers. They literally laughed, and it was a running joke among among them. The only person who believed in me was my dad, and he had no idea what I was trying to do.

I chose the path. Everyone tried to kick me off that path. I could have easily stayed with my nice, safe, corporate job at Boeing. Lots and lots of people do.

Influence should not be conflated with force. If someone put a gun to my head, I'd probably do whatever they ask. In fact, I have. Twice. That's force. It's a heluva lot different from mere influence.

I agree to some extent that people can control their situation with choices, but I would like to push back on a few of those examples as I think it's a little disingenuous to say everyone can simply make choices in our society and do better. For example, living in a bad location also often means one would have limited options for work, which limits their income and prevents them from being able to just move out of that situation. Limited free time from working multiple low-paying part- or even full-time jobs to support oneself or others can make paths to gaining more education, whether free or not, just not feasible. Good luck getting a somewhat reasonable SBA loan with a criminal record! I know you are giving very simple examples, but many of them fail to account for the situation one would be in to require improving the situation. In theory, yes, I agree, there are ways out of bad situations simply by taking the correct steps, but those paths out may just not be open for people in the very situations where they might most benefit.

I've seen many truly impoverished areas of the United States (large swathes of West Virginia primarily come to mind, no offense to the West Virginians on here) where these paths are not tenable. Many of these areas straight up don't have regular internet access. These whole regions are lacking in education and options for mobility are severely restricted. I simply do not believe it is because everyone in that area has decided they just don't want to do better for themselves, but that there are systemic problems preventing these people from being able to take these steps.

> move

Allow me to point out the millions of immigrants that walk across a continent to try and slip over the border into America. The ones that make it rarely have more than the clothes on their back.

Yet they moved away from a bad situation to a better one, and have made it to every corner of the country.

> but that there are systemic problems preventing these people from being able to take these steps.

Nobody there has their feet nailed to the ground.

> Allow me to point out the millions of immigrants that walk across a continent to try and slip over the border into America.

Sure, but even when they get to America, unless they already have some degree of monetary means, a large portion of those immigrants will end up stuck in low-paying, high-labor jobs, often in agriculture and heavy industry, without savings or means to move elsewhere for years. Those paths to better work, education, or location once in America are not going to be open to them as they will have no resources to draw upon. Not being a citizen also can be severely restricting. Most mobility is not seen for one or more generations and many immigrants simply remain in deep poverty indefinitely. Immigration is not a silver bullet to a great life, even if an immigrant does everything correctly. Would you say they get stuck here of their own volition after risking their lives and the lives of their families to get to America, or that it is systemically hard for an immigrant to rise out of poverty in America?

> Nobody there has their feet nailed to the ground.

I am trying to highlight that moving, especially to a higher cost of living area, is expensive and people risk being homeless for a non-trivial amount of time at an often slim chance of doing better. That can be very dangerous for a myriad of reasons and I imagine a risk that is simply too great for most, even if they are willing to do difficult things to do better. I would argue that this is not their fault for simply being born in an area with poor wages, education, and support systems, but that the area they originally lived in has a more systemic issue preventing mobility.

I made the acquaintance of an Afghan refugee who got out with nothing but his skin a couple years ago. He was operating a thriving car service. I had little doubt he'd be a millionaire soon.

> this is not their fault for simply being born in an area

I never said it was their fault for where they were born. But once they are legal adults, they can move.

> especially to a higher cost of living area

Seattle being a high cost of living has completely failed at preventing thousands of homeless people from arriving.

> or means to move elsewhere

They had zero means to move here other than their feet. They can move elsewhere.

> or that it is systemically hard for an immigrant to rise out of poverty in America?

If people constantly tell them they cannot, quite a few will believe it. Have you ever done anything that everyone told you you could not do?

> I made the acquaintance of an Afghan refugee who got out with nothing but his skin a couple years ago. He was operating a thriving car service. I had little doubt he'd be a millionaire soon.

A bit too "n = 1" there. What do the statistics of Afghan immigrants in your country in general show? Do they support your overall argument?

I know two others, from two other countries, who came here with nothing but a suitcase and are now millionaires.

So "n = 3". I enquired as to broad geographic statistics, not anecdotal evidence.

You are not wrong. Part of why I’m a huge fan of immigration, is that the numbers show that every major wave of immigration the US has encountered led to massive GDP growth. Immigrants tend to be net savers.

But, I believe it’s important to make immigration a little hard. Why? because it acts as a filter, that ensures that more capable immigrants are more likely to make it through.

I say this, because correlation is not causation. The people who are able to emigrate are more likely to be successful immigrants. So please be a little careful with confirmation bias. I tend to agree that moving out of a bad situation is a very good idea. I also know sometimes a bad situation is something you have to deal with. Some people really do have obligations that keep them tied to a location, often in the form of family (and I say this as a believer in dropping toxic family members).

Humans have a limited amount of willpower. The average person can handle addressing a couple of these issues, but some people (especially the poor and the ill) have so many simultaneous issues that their willpower is too divided for them to make meaningful headway.

> ill

I usually preface my comments on this topic with legal adults of sound mind and body.

> poor

The millions walking over the border have nothing, but they see opportunity in the US.

I think you have a quite limited understanding of the funds and planning that go into crossing the border, and also how effectively people who make that crossing solve other issues in their lives.

My brother-in-law's family crossed the border illegally out of dire necessity. However, they still have many others issues (managing money, working for awful bosses, living in crappy housing, family in-fighting, unhappy marriage, etc.) that they have struggled to fix. Some of these issues are so bad that it has led my brother-in-law to distance himself from some of them.

So yes, they did a really hard thing to solve an extremely pressing problem, but it does not mean they have solved all of their problems. There is only so much one person can do to fix their life when there are many things wrong with it. They can usually only prioritize a couple of things.

> I think you have a quite limited understanding of the funds and planning that go into crossing the border, and also how effectively people who make that crossing solve other issues in their lives.

And yet they managed to do it. They could and did move to where there's more opportunity.

> but it does not mean they have solved all of their problems

Nobody solves all their problems. But they can prioritize, make a plan, and knock them down one at a time. Success isn't instant, either.

Or do nothing and remain a victim.

America was populated by Europeans arriving here with nothing. They worked their way into the middle class and the rich. The American West was populated by people walking across the continent. It's still happening today. People have choices.

Then let me reiterate my original comment, because I don't understand your argument against it:

>Humans have a limited amount of willpower. The average person can handle addressing a couple of these issues, but some people (especially the poor and the ill) have so many simultaneous issues that their willpower is too divided for them to make meaningful headway.

I also want to mention (again) that immigrating long distances or across closed borders is not free. It's actually very expensive, and often more expensive when done illegally (since those helping you are assuming a personal risk). It is not something that poor people can do. Someone might make themselves poor doing it, but that doesn't mean that they started with nothing.

Ah yes, people just stopped taking personal responsibility these last forty years, resulting in an obesity epidemic and mass addiction to phones and social media. Makes total sense. Just have some more willpower!

These are not mutually exclusive choices.

I own my choices, AND I blame the corps for a LOT of the damage done in the world today, especially loss of attention span.

More guns in slack jawed drunk idiot's hands --> more shooting

More eye candy apps in people's hands --> more slack jawed idiots

People can only "choose" among the choices in front of them, and most people choose not based on what's going to be best for them, but on "what's popular".

For discussion's sake, let's just call this phenomenon "monkey brain".

The fact is that 1st world IQ is in decline because an increasing amount of the population can't pay attention.

I personally don't buy the argument that it's genetic. It seems quite clear this phenomenon is being driven by social norms.

I tend to have a view somewhat similar to this IMO.

My way of managing this stuff has been to straight up block the worst offending services on all my devices (Facebook, Twitter), and use tools to restrict the amount of time I can access the others that I know steal my attention, but i've consciously decided I get enough value from to make a small amount of theft worth it (reddit, hacker news, etc).

I get 15 minutes a day on Reddit and HN (each), but all "traditional" social networks are flat out blocked.

It's exactly the same style I would use if I had a traditional addiction I was trying to manage. Use tools to make it impossible to access the things that feed the addiction the worst, and other tools to force moderation with the things that make my life a bit better/more interesting, but could lead to slippery slopes.

I think I would rather people choose to turn off their notifications, and uninstall social media rather than government intervention.

It's a lot of work though. I recently did a factory reset of an Android tablet and, wow, it's quite a lot of work to get it to shut up.

I also religiously disable any notifications on windows as well, but Microsoft have been making them a mandatory feature of some applications. Snip and Sketch for example requires you to click on the notification if you want to get to the Sketch part. I much prefer the old way. (It also had less annoying animation)

I only allow push notifications for messages from loved ones. For any other app, the moment it sends me a notification it gets banned from pushing anything ever.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter installed any more (and never had Instagram or TikTok - I'm too old). I log on to their websites on my phone if I want to see something. It's a good amount of friction.

I think it's a thoughtful tale, but I really cannot get behind the premise. Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole?

It's a vice of the modern world. We have made food that tastes wo good, you want to eat forever. We have drugs which give you euphoria (for a time).

And, we have entertainment that is far better than before.

Well, for one I don't think there is anything particularly unique about the web. We have had 100 years of electronic entertainment. The sentiment used to be 'TV is rotting our brains'.

He's probably speaking figuratively when he says "stolen". I think he's referring to how we didn't really see it coming until it was too late and now a lot of people have been left without the ability to pay attention.

> Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole?

It's obviously figurative... unless you believe Professor MindMiner has built a machine to *schlorp* liquidified Attention out of unsuspecting victims into his own swollen and increasingly-monomaniacal cranium.

However it's much shorter than "impaired or damaged without our informed consent by outside forces because it profits them to do so."

Well, that's funny. But I take it to mean that it was intentionally made addictive, rather than just being enjoyable.

By analogy, some people say that food is being made addictive. But I think there is a dubious difference between an addictive hamburger and just a tasty hamburger.

A pity it didn't get specific at all about the mechanisms that steal focus.

And even though cold turkey detox is not a viable solution, there are things individuals can do that help. Like disabling notifications for absolutely everything except messages from a small number of people.

> disabling notifications for absolutely everything except messages from a small number of people

Doesn't everyone do this? Maybe that's why I find articles like this so confusing

From my experience, the vast majority of people do not. In our rarefied circles, quite a few people do.

I had one of those "blessings in disguise" circumstances around 2017. I had just purchased a shiny new "phone of my dreams"[0] to have it land face down on the concrete two days later resulting in a few large cracks.

I paid full price for the phone; it wasn't top of the line, I could afford to replace it but it wouldn't be "fun" -- and you can guess that I purchased no insurance. Owing to stubbornness and a general desire to punish myself a little so that I didn't make that mistake, again, I decided I'd continue to use it as long as the touch-screen accepted input and was basically usable (without injury).

I expected to put up with it for a few months. A few things happened: Doom scrolling basically stopped, entirely. When I visited social media, I'd prefer my laptop so the time I spent there was "maybe once in the evening" rather than any time "I had to wait". I became the obnoxious guy who replied to texts with phone calls[1], and wrote e-mail replies that were longer than the "Sent from my ..." notice (which none of my e-mails contained because all were sent from my well worn keyboard).

The phone didn't come out during dinners/meetings. To be clear: I don't feel the need to engage people in conversation simply because we're "both waiting for a meeting to start" and "we work together." But be the one guy in the room who doesn't have his phone out and just ... sit there. It's at least a little awkward; you sort of feel like a voyeur as everyone buries their nose in their screen as if the act of doing so makes them invisible to the outside world.

It takes a second, but someone will almost always look up and notice you're ... just ... sitting there. You can watch the expression change on their face as they question this odd social behavior but it eventually lands on: Someone seems to think we shouldn't have our phones out!. A "guilty look" and a sly "sneak it into the pocket/chair" action later and ... now there are two people, sitting quietly, watching a room of people staring down at screens. By the time the third person follows, someone feels the need to start small-talking and wow some folks are out of practice!

There were a few occasions where I thought I may have been giving off a look, unknown to myself. I really don't care about other's phone habits if I am not their parent or romantic partner. I write software and work with others who write software. Most of us our phone habits were excessive before "it was normal"; a few of you, somehow manage to handle conversation and Doom Scrolling simultaneously with minimal effort. So I occasionally found myself in the odd position of having to grant some sort of not-directly-requested-but-clearly-desired permission ... like I'd be doing exactly that if I could; don't mind me at all. It wasn't that I had a completely busted phone, it was just really inconvenient to read anything reasonable on; and I'd rather look at the dots in the ceiling tiles than remind myself of my $600 "dammit".

Outside of those weird situations, in smaller group/1:1 settings I've found if my phone isn't out, their phone will stay in their purse/pocket and we'll actually engage in whatever activity brought us away from our home/homes and into the world.

Going on a year, I had no interest in replacing the phone. I kept the broken screen phone for longer than I'd ever used a mobile device. As if to test my resolve, this phone refused to die. Eventually, on year 4.5, it stopped taking a charge. My new phone gets a little more use, but I'm much more aware of it, now. I'm the last person to take the thing out of my pocket; my notifications are customized to very quiet tones except for a small number of contacts so I know when it's worth "responding to the bell."

I'm not recommending anyone go out and take a hammer to their phone, or anything. That first few months took a lot of resolve to not just plunk down the MasterCard and fix my mistake, but I'm glad I didn't.

[0] It was a Samsung, but I can't remember which one.

[1] Having the additionally side-effect of eliminating text messages for things that a few seconds thought, or at worst -- Google -- could handle with fewer social obligations attached.

Previous discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539

I read most of the article and then went outside for a cigarette.

Right? Frankly this is barely an exaggerated tl;dr:

My Godson was randomly obsessed with Elvis for one summer so years later I forced him to go to Graceland but he wanted to be on snapchat and also watches porn. I needed to understand why this happened so I traveled to 3 different continents to speak with experts but I won't tell you much about what they said. I vacationed to Provincetown and did a digital detox I saw on Oprah. Anyway we should just tell Google and Facebook to shutdown. We must fight for these rights like feminists fought for abortion rights (which they just lost) we can't blame ourselves for this problem, its systemic.

Thanks I needed a tl:dr; I definitely didn't have the attention span to read it all!

The abortion quip makes me chuckle. Every legal scholar (including the queen bee RBG herself) warned for decades that Roe v Wade was originally decided on a stretch of a privacy argument.

My recommendation: don’t try to shoehorn morally debatable things in via another vehicle hoping for a miracle. You may get your miracle, but it will most likely be temporary. When you argue very important things, stick to the central pillars of the idea. Don’t be enthralled by the thought of a “quick win”.

> YouTube is essentially unavoidable in day to day life

That’s absurd. What in your life makes watching YouTube every day an essential activity? What won’t you be able to accomplish if you don’t watch YouTube every day?

> YouTube is essentially unavoidable in day to day life

This statement is wholly and thoroughly wrong. Just plain incorrect.

youboob is 100% avoidable and completely unnecessary.

But I chose to respond to this post for a specific reason: it's a perfect example of the loss of perspective at the root of the "loss of attention" phenomenon.

One can only believe youboob is necessary in a very carefully crafted artificial environment.

This is why the #1 advice for everyone is: Go Outside! Put your phone down!

The mental state of constant immersion has crippled your world view.

You can very easily enjoy your day without ever engaging w/ the goggle corps..

What would companies do when the people they hire cannot perform because of this addiction? What would companies do when people cannot earn money to pay for their services because of the addiction? What would they do when people do not have money to buy their phones? This is like drugs all over again. And companies, such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc., do not care at all. Will we transition to a world of very short attention span and that would be the new normal?

Regarding to this I personally predict that in the future there will be a massive increase of unemployment because of the decrease of Attention spam among the young population, which will lead to more people failing in their education and them not being able of developing any abilities that are important for labor (Like discipline)

Either that or there will be a decrease of professionals.

I think as long as quarterly numbers are rewarded, they'll continue to be optimized.

You get what you measure for, after all.

Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of focus, there would be some clear metric for focus which researchers would have 20-30 years of data and studies on, right? This should be a very testable hypothesis, so where is all the hard science on it?

Even in this article, the author just takes some statements from neuroscientists and a study on context-switching in order to make a bunch of unfounded conjecture.

Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social scientists.

which is all fine, desirable, and ultimately necessary.

that doesn't mean that they make good arguments that help us try to decide what to do, convince other people, or even underscore the potential value of those opinions

HN: what, no research?

Also HN: social science research is garbage and everyone who practices it is somewhere on a spectrum between delusion and fraud

It's almost as if HN isn't a monoculture.

I’ll need to see some research backing that up

No need to panic: there is some research available. I found this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps... .

It links to an article in the New York Times, citing a study that lasted approximately 20 years. (No direct link, because paywall)

Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is it implying that we spend less time on websites because our attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention spans.

Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would have to measure attention span through a metric like duration spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones), is there something else people mean when they talk about attention spans getting worse?

IIRC, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" had sources at the back. My copy is packed away and it's been awhile since I read it, so I could be wrong, but that's another that you might consider.

"Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" is about a different topic - disconnection from community and social interactions that we used to have, but it's an overlapping topic. It has lots of data and graphs.

Indeed, "Further Reading", p. 252 of the print edition:

<https://archive.org/details/shallowswhatinte0000carr_r4d5/pa...>

you can persistently keep talking to people 7 days per week, drives them nuts but eventually they return to earth for as long as you keep it up. skip 3 days and all answers are humm uhh again, if you get any

What

Thats how humans talk when their attention gets stolen

text-ada-001?

i know people who only do screens, they cant have a conversation anymore, if you say something they don't hear you, if you poke them they say they are busy. seems reasonable until a year goes by without any conversation. then its fair to wonder where they went.

i don't normally keep talking if people rather not listen or participate but if i force it they produce short sentenced, then long ones, then dialogs and stories, make jokes, have a laugh. they stay that way as long as i maintain the effort. skip a week and they forget how to talk again

Reply on news.ycombinator.com