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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #B5C4DF 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>>…</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> <b>On Behalf Of </b>spike<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Such is the nature of my decreasing attention span that I set up everything and forgot to make my point. I wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>>…</span>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<span style='color:#1F497D'>…</span>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<span style='color:#1F497D'>…</span>spike<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>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…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>spike<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></div></div></body></html>