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Comment by crimsoneer | Hacker News Reader

The interesting follow-up here... there is no reason these effects should be restricted to children. Like, if children can't learn with devices in a classroom, it suggests executives can't learn in an office (and might give a hint as to why we haven't seen expected productivity benefits driven by it).

But again, if the effect was this strong, I'd really expect to see broader evidence (even just at a national level based of digital uptake).

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These authors have big Google Docs of evidence, https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews/. But if you read it, you will see the effect is (AFAICT) limited to certain populations. There is a significant fraction of students that do have trouble with executive function and staying on task and will fail to do their homework because of social media access. Then there are the other students that have no trouble staying off social media when they have to do homework.

Part of this is because the pre-frontal cortex (associated with logic, will power, discipline, focus, etc) doesn't finish developing until about age 25.

Until then, folks can be reliant on the adults in their environments older than that age, if they haven't built up some abilities.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3621648/

> (and might give a hint as to why we haven't seen expected productivity benefits driven by it)

I'd be shocked if that's not a significant part of why. Most folks will get more work done when their only alternatives are trashcan basketball or doodling, versus... the Web.

I suspect another cause is that a great deal of application of computer technology in organizations aims to improve a certain kind of legibility of processes, which is something management loves a great deal, but the cost of attaining this legibility is high enough (including in hidden or hard-to-track ways) that any benefits are neutralized or all-accounted-for costs actually go up.

[EDIT] A third cause is probably that median ability to use computers remains very low among office workers. There continue to exist offices where knowing how to copy-paste(!) for more than just bare text, or extremely-basic spreadsheet use beyond "put numbers in it" makes you a wizard. I'm not kidding.

i'd love to have a distraction-proof workstation that would force me into my IDE or whatever design doc i'm working on and block out everything else.

but it's not possible because the job requires all these gateway-drugs-to-distraction to be on the forefront of your workspace: * keep slack open in case you're needed in that support thread * keep a browser open so you can google the api docs for something (that's how i ended up here right now) * keep spotify playing in the background so you can drown out the noise of the open office/work-from-home-noise

This is possible! https://www.techlockdown.com/

The effect is absolutely that strong, even on adults. My anecdata in IT overwhelmingly supports that claim. Be it educational institutions, large enterprises, SMBs, or just Mom and Dad with their cell phones, the proliferation of distraction boxes has reduced critical and rational thinking abilities that are foundational elements of learning. After all, why try to reason out what you could just look up online? And if you can get the answer somewhere quicker, well, now you can also skim Twitter or Instagram with the time you saved.

During my brief stint working IT for private schools, with their SMARTBoards in every classroom, Meraki APs blanketing their 300 year old campus structures, and Chromebooks in the hands of every student, the feedback I got was that students hated having technology always with them (to the point of breaking their Chromebooks on purpose), while teachers would deliberately not report broken technology (like their SMARTBoards) so they could force kids off of electronics and into a textbook or journal. Despite the often adversarial relationship of students and teachers, both cohorts acted unconsciously towards the same outcome of less technology.

This early experience has also informed my perspective on the role of technology in the workplace as a force amplifier rather than mandatory toolset. It’s why I’m often fiercely resistant to any “new” technology coming in that doesn’t solve a problem we’ve already identified, as blindly expanding the IT estate just adds to the noise of the enterprise and detracts from the signals important to business.

Even the younger folks (20-30) I find community with outside of tech spaces bemoan the over reliance on technology in general. They aren’t luddites by any stretch of the truth, and they love BlueSky and Instagram and TikTok and all the usual social spaces where their friends are, but they’ve engaged in more active resistance to technology as a necessary component in everything they buy. This same cohort is often an ally at work, because they seek to push products or solutions that remove technology interactions from the daily grind through automation, rather than dragging in the latest toys like we (millennials) did.

There have been consistent reporting for two decades that screens are leading to measurable reductions in attention span. Three decades of reports linking the internet and digital culture with mental health issues. What evidence is missing?

I'd be particularly keen on evidence affecting primary outcomes - eg, are people genuinly more productive or healthier. Attention span is an interesting metric, but if it doesn't directly affect how much work you can do or the quality of it in a meaningful way, I am less fussed.

Given reports on multitasking consistently show it degrades performance this kinda seems like a slam dunk?

People with an Internet- connected screen appear to have a short attention span because they have instant access to a multitude of things that they're interested in, competing for their attention with whatever you want them to be focusing on.

That what you want them to be focusing on is no longer the path of least boredom like it was in the previous era; the path of least boredom goes through their mobile device.

People's ability and willingness to concentrate on something that interested in has not changed one iota. That sort of biological change takes hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

Observations of the behavior of people interacting with tech can easily support the wrong argument that people's attention spans have increased. Just look at how somebody can play the same game for 11 hours straight, right?

> People with an Internet- connected screen appear to have a short attention span because they have instant access to a multitude of things that they're interested in, competing for their attention with whatever you want them to be focusing on.

This is incorrect. There have been repeated studies that show a distinct decline in individuals ability to consume and process long-form text. Folks brains are literally remodeling towards ADHD-like behaviors.

But that's more like a developmental situation in the individual having to do with their education.

I would expect, say, individuals not going to school past grade two showing a declined ability to multiply 12 by 11.

People's handling of long form text may be off from several decades ago, but it's still better than their illiterate ancestors 500 years ago.

It has literally nothing to do with education. It's the brain's own neuroplasticity responding to overstimulation:

https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/05/30/what-exc...

I suspect it's not screens alone, but whether one is creating with screens or consuming with them. Different parts of the brain.

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