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It's easy to get caught up in negative judgments about another generation [1] and it can be hard to put one group's vices in context when they seem different from your own.

That said, I know for myself that my attention span has gotten shorter. I used to read more. Now I listen to audiobooks. When reading text, even engaging fiction can be a struggle. I read one or two pages and feel the urge to check something else or look at something else or get up and do something. I know this wasn't the case in middle school or high school (late 2000s).

I think it's because of first podcasts and then watching / listening to too thousands of YouTube videos at 2x speed. I've become much more "efficient" at consuming entertainment content - so "efficient" that I can get bored listening to someone telling an interesting story at 1x speed.

The only advantage I have is that I can tell that this has happened and I can work against it by forcing myself to read more. But if things were always like that, how would I know? When you're sleep deprived every day for years, you don't notice how much it is affecting you. It's the same with a short attention span.

[1]: Aside: the omnipresent talk about generations these days is maybe not the best thing to begin with.

That's pretty spot on with my experience as well, though I'm a decade older.

Maybe it'd help to have a new perspective on it? I think you're completely right that you're just a much more efficient consumer now than you once were. But what's wrong with that?

I'm in the same boat as you, except that I don't feel I have attention span problems. If what I'm reading is a bad use of time, I switch to something else. If it's not, I have no trouble reading a long article or paper. I frequently read a blog post and discover half an hour later that I just read what would be 30-40 pages if printed out. It doesn't feel like a lot of reading because there's no physical page turning, but it is.

If you can consume an interesting story at 2x speed, there's no moral or personal wrong in wanting to consume it at 2x speed. Just do it! Books are mere technology: they can and should be replaced with something better if it comes along.

The key word here (and this is something I fight personally) is consuming. You don’t learn anything by consuming it; you only learn by doing it. So being able to watch the lecture at 2X is only helping if it makes more time to do the exercises.

But doing the exercises is hard (much like physical exercise, that pain is in fact the signal that you’re making progress). And the more time we spend just consuming, the less natural it feels to work.

It’s so easy to blast through a lecture or speed read a text and feel like you accomplished “learning”. That illusion is destroyed as soon as you have to actually do something (in school, that’s usually write an essay or pass a test).

In other words, the bottleneck has never been how fast you can consume the text. It’s how fast you can do the work to internalize the knowledge.

I'm 34. In highschool I read long, difficult literary fiction for fun. Now I can just about manage good genre fiction (think something like Iain Bank's Culture series) if I put my mind to it and take breaks to look at my phone.

I wonder if I'll ever be able to fix my attention span.

It’s a practice thing. Start leaving your phone at home for short trips and get used to being a little bored again. I promise you if there’s an emergency, there are 500 cell phones within a hundred yards.

> Banning phones won't help, phones are just a surface level symptom of the fact that humanities courses at minimum have become completely fake and professors don't care enough to stop it.

It's not just humanities courses and it also affects "elite" universities.

For the graduate NLP course my advisor taught at UMass Amherst, despite allowing ChatGPT for a take home test (this was a couple years ago), 60% of the students broke into two separate collusion rings (one Chinese group and another South Asian) and copied off of each other. They got caught when the answers were wrong, but in a different way than ChatGPT. Despite the seriousness of the rampant cheating, students were not failed out of the course, mainly because it reflects badly on the University if they fail. My advisor had to go through a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy in the process.

Jump forward to Cornell University where I'm currently a postdoc and grade inflation is real. They had to get rid of reporting course-wide median grade beside a student's grade on their transcript [1] to help combat it.

That hasn't prevented the pressure to pass students with high marks despite abysmal performance. I supervised an undergrad's research one semester as an independent study course. That student did very little work and despite multiple promptings over several weeks, would fail to provide their code for me to help debug and provide code review. I ended up giving them a B+, which is somehow considered "failing". The student even reached out after grades were assigned to beg me to reconsider. None of the students I've worked with so far have had the skills I'm pretty sure I mastered by that time (this includes work with undergrads, master's students, and PhD students). I'm continually shocked by the caliber of students here compared to what I assumed before joining.

I trust professors who've been teaching for decades when they say something has qualitatively changed.

[1]: https://registrar.cornell.edu/grades-transcripts/median-grad...

> Then at the end he asks what he's supposed to do... maintain standards by failing the students? Heaven forbid! The University might make less money!

He did say it, but you have to keep reading after that. Fail too many students and you will get called in by the dean for a "discussion" where they basically tell you to stop doing that. For the non-tenured faculty this is not something they can reasonably fight. Maybe tenured faculty could, and they might not get outright fired, but their teaching load could be reduced or students will simply not sign up for their classes once they have a reputation for being a hardass.

Aside from that, nearly every student manages to have some "disability" that requires an accommodation. I had one professor friend tell me a student required an accommodation that they not receive any negative feedback. They literally weren't allowed to tell the student when they were wrong.

"this is not something they can reasonably fight"

They don't seem afraid of activism if it's protesting the current bad thing.

The university administration doesn’t discourage that. In some cases they encourage it.

They won’t get denied tenure for protesting the current thing. It’s more likely they could get denied tenure for not loudly protesting the current thing.

I did keep reading after that, but it didn't change anything.

As the sibling notes, academics have no problem suddenly finding their voice when they discover a colleague who's secretly harboring mildly right wing views. The open letters, protests, outrage and demands for resignations flow like water until the administration folds, usually about 0.25 seconds later.

The author describes a problem created by the policies of the university leadership, but refuses to lay the blame at their feet. Instead he/she says things like "This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem" and "It’s the phones, stupid." after describing a problem that is 100% caused by the faculty themselves. Because where do the deans come from? Why would they have leverage to dismiss a professor who upheld standards? They came from the faculty, and they have leverage because the faculty created this problem and are willing to propagate it.

The dean is like a middle manager. They are not the university leadership. The actual leadership is the president and board of trustees and the legions of administrators who create and enforce policies. They are not faculty or if they once were like the president and some other upper level positions, they left that path a long time ago.

They care about things like the US News and World Report rankings, and if students are failing classes and it starts hurting their graduation rate and hurting their ranking, they put a stop to it.

I wonder if anyone has considered creating a ranking system based on some other, hidden metric/algorithm so it’s not useless and easily gamed.

Did you understand what was being said.

You are not engaging with the central issue- the education pipeline is depositing students with a far lower attention span and capability than ever before, in college classes, for all subjects, including Math.

You are banging on humanities as it is a ritualistic target. Math and science teachers, including comp sci teachers are pointing this out.

The trend exists.

> the education pipeline is depositing students with a far lower attention span and capability than ever before, in college classes, for all subjects, including Math.

Unsurprisingly. In the past:

1. Those with lower attention spans generally didn't try to go to college in the first place. They often didn't even graduate from high school[1].

2. If they did try, colleges rejected their application long before they ever arrived on campus. Now colleges seek to accommodate them.

College used to be just for elites. At some point we decided it should be for everyone. When you try to shove more and more people into college, you're going to find out that most people don't have what it takes. It is like us deciding everyone should get to play in the NFL and then wonder why the talent is so poor...

We can't have it both ways.

[1] When I was in high school the graduation rate was only around 60%. Nowadays it is around 90%. That is a substantial shift in relatively few years. Did the students suddenly become better students out of the blue? Of course not.

As I recall, the author of the article looks at this at over a long enough time horizon to call out the difference.

I rechecked the article, and they’ve been teaching for 30 years. I went through the links (1) (2) and it looks like this has been accelerating since 2010, with one comment saying they noticed it starting in 2006.

1) https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students

2) https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a1...

This is from the article.

> with one comment saying they noticed it starting in 2006.

Yup. This is exactly when high school graduation rates started to skyrocket – my cohort being from a few years earlier – and with virtually everyone (save those who are completely disabled) graduating by the time we were into the 2010s. That was a significant shift in the landscape, and it happened quickly to boot.

Shove a greater number of people with less ability into education and you are going to notice.

I disagree that's the central issue, that's why I didn't engage with it.

The belief that students are somehow now mentally broken in a way unique and never-before-seen is an enormous claim. These articles never manage to support this claim. Instead they just assert it as if it's so obvious it doesn't require any actual work to show.

Where you see some problem that starts pre-university, what I see is students acting rationally given the system they find themselves in. My own university experience was decades ago but no different except for the absence of smartphones and laptops in the lecture theatres. Bad lecturers, bad material, rampant cheating and fake marking schemes in which there was no connection between work and final grades: all the problems have been there for a very long time. Phones didn't create this problem, educators did. It's just easier for faculty to play pretend when students appear to be staring at the front of the auditorium because they have nothing else to stare at.

Nah, University is too late to fix this. But clearly kids aren’t fully “passing” their high school and probably middle school skills.

Mass failings while satisfying has an air of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. As a parent I can see the mass pull towards phones, practically impossible to disentangle save for simple surgical regulation.

No one should be allowed to have phones in class. That’s it.

My vibe is that phones have this bimodal effect on cognition, which further confuses the debate.

The smart kids use them as tools to complement and accelerate their learning but everyone else mostly just gets dumber from the infinite Oww my Balls adjacent content they're addicted to.

At this professor's Average U, everyone is mostly in the worse camp.