It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
I’d posit that we just puritanically glorify anything perceived as difficult, regardless of the correlation with “intellect.” I’m fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
People with long attention spans can still focus on things that take very little focus, like short-form videos. But people with short attention spans have a hard time focusing on things like books, or even movies. So having a long attention span opens up more intellectual avenues for you, without restricting any.
Yes, there's always some puritan attitudes involved in how we talk about this. But I do feel that people who can't read a book because of attention issues are missing out on something.
This is vibe psychology. I owe my entire career to a short attention span that drives me to constantly learn about new ideas, technologies, and hobbies.
> This is vibe psychology. I owe my entire career to a short attention span that drives me to constantly learn about new ideas, technologies, and hobbies.
This is a narrow minded view. Just because something works for you doesn't mean it is something we should optimize for.
All great intellects we study today were the polar opposite of this.
Watching a 2 hour movie is perceived as difficult?
> I'm fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
Maybe, if we're really generous, there's a reasonable version of this argument that you've failed to adequately communicate here... But it really seems like you're trying to say that a short attention span is a good sign of progress, or something?
I know HN and SV in general has a culty addiction to contrarianism, and it rarely elicits more than an eye roll from me. Framing a short attention span as anything other than a bad thing is wild to me, and I honestly don't know how to respond to something like that (or if my sarcasm detector is off). Do we need scientific studies to show that goldfish brain == bad?
I was being glib because “attention span” is a poorly defined concept that people are more interested in deriding than understanding, as you demonstrate with your comment that we don’t need science to know that it’s bad. I’m specifically criticizing the tendency to ascribe virtue to tediousness while passing it off as psychology.
After a lifetime of having to prove that my ADHD doesn’t make me a drag on society, call me skeptical of people who insist they know what makes a brain objectively worse than another based on vibes. It’s one thing to discuss the impact of tuning an algorithm to be addictive, it’s another to make a claim that a preference for one form of media over another is a Problem.
Ironically, I’m a pretty heavy reader and find it funny that people treat reading like some paragon of mental discipline when it’s just the media that I find stimulating. I absolutely have a much shorter “attention span” than most people who primarily consume short form video.
