[ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of spike
Subject: Re: [ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

 

 

Such is the nature of my decreasing attention span that I set up everything
and forgot to make my point.  I wrote:

 

>.This leads to the second conjecture: the internet and video games have
made us much more skilled at dealing with floods of data, figuring out how
to filter it and get just what we need.  I have a friend who is in his 70s,
a doctor.This doctor had a very busy practice until a couple years ago, so
he didn't have much time for twiddling away the hours on the "internets"
until very recently.  I became his advisor and got him going after his
semi-retirement.  He experienced the whole head rush most of us here
experienced in the 90s with all that free information now available right in
our own homes.spike

 

Here we have an informative case of a highly intelligent older recent
internet user.  He doesn't have a highly developed bullshit detector.  Super
smart guy, but he falls for obvious gags and errors.  He sends me stuff from
the Onion for instance, which someone sent him as a gag.  He thought it was
the real thing, and was asking for clarification of some outrageous
silliness.  With all his skill in finding answers, he seems to be swamped
with data, confused by the sheer volume.

 

I had an idea, which Rafal or Bill might comment on.  Doctors can go thru
their whole careers using data that was pre-filtered.  They have their
medical textbooks, the JAMA, mostly credible and careful medical journals,
etc, all high quality reliable information.  They knew to disregard or
heavily discount material supplied by advertisers and vendors, but pay close
attention to some select sources and studies.  They knew how to get
everything pre-filtered at least up to the plausible level before they even
invest valuable time to read it.  

 

Now they (and we) just have mountains of stuff we need to filter ourselves.
It takes hours of digging through porn just to get to the good stuff.
SCIENCE rather, I meant hours of digging through all the bogus SCIENCE
papers, to get to the good science, that's what I meant.  Moving right
along.

 

So with our decreasing attention spans, we have gotten better at figuring
out how to cut thru and find what we need, better at detecting bogosity.  We
get better at following perhaps a dozen or more different areas of interest,
something we just couldn't do before the internet.  That part is really fun.
But it has a price.  This is something James Gleick really missed in his
book Faster: the Acceleration of Just About Everything.

 

My earlier comment regarding Perry Mason episodes: great stories.  But I
will not go back and watch them now.  I think Anders pointed out before: the
opportunity cost of viewing old TV shows from one's childhood has increased
dramatically, because one misses out on all the cool stuff one could have
learned.  Just this evening, I went over a whole pile of material online
explaining why all 1a supernovae have the same absolute brightness, and what
a wonderful time it was in my own misspent youth, reading about
Rayleigh-Taylor instability and all that cool stuff.  Then Saul Perlmutter
and his guys using that to figure out the inflationary universe, oh it has
been a terrific last couple decades to be into astronomy.  Any time spent
listening to old Perry Mason episodes is time not spent reading about
supernovae.

 

spike

 

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