Individual experience reports are nice, yet it does not really account to a decent study.

Reading the paper mentioned, I also feel that we need more than just experience reports (e.g. comments and feelings in forums like hackernews) and controlled experiments.

Comprehension is down, yet I wonder about recall and the general amount of information we are processing. As we experience a lot of information in context, it might lead to a decrease in overall comprehension, yet a stronger recall on the bits we do remember. It would be super interesting to setup a larger scale in-situ study on the topic. Yet, I wonder how to get a baseline on that.

>Individual experience reports are nice, yet it does not really account to a decent study.

On the other hand, the latter are rare, and you don't even know it they're decent (lots of "landmark" studies get debunked years or decades later).

Where I am mostly unable to read normal books these days I am able to read thousands of pages (250-275 words) of webfiction a week if I have the time. I wonder where the difference lies between these? The type of content or the actual physical action of "grabbing a book and getting some relaxing time".

I think the Internet rewired my brain. I find it much more comfortable to read a book using the Kindle app's Continuous Scroll setting.

Reading or skimming / "power-reading", in the "I've read War And Peace in 2 hours. It's about Russia and Napoleon or something".

He, I always wondered if someone would use that. Sure, pages aren't technically a necessity anymore, but I think continuous scrolling is the absolute worst. Turning a page gives opportunity for a pause. Sounds weird, but I somehow need that for reading longer books.

I've started leaving my phone on silent and sitting on my kitchen table while I'm working. Just having it within arms reach at my desk has become too much at times. The lack of focus wasn't nearly this bad at the beginning of the pandemic for me.

I've silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it's been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.

I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.

I've been doing the same thing for a few months now. At first I had it set up to shut up after 6 pm, but these days it's just completely silent. I check it every so often, on my own terms, because there are some things that I do want to engage with—a call or a text message, for example.

Still, I've had to push back against the expectation of being available 24/7 and responding immediately to everything. A text that goes unanswered for a few minutes becomes a phone call or three, to ask why I'm not responding. It's bloody exhausting sometimes.

As for me, people have learnt that they can't reach me most of the time instantly. You don't have to answer the phone calls either. You can say later that you didn't see it and your phone was muted (which is true). People get used to it pretty quickly. I guess, for most people it's just a few family members or other very close relations anyway. Romantic partners are the worst, of course, in this regard. One has to be smart to set the expectations at the very beginning. (I guess it can be done later too, though.)

I have had my smartphone on vibrate-only since pretty much the beginning of having a smartphone, as I find it much less distracting than audio notifications, and much easier to ignore. I have almost all notifications turned off, except for calls and texts, and notifications from my security system. It's that last thing that prevents me from being able to leave my phone out of sight all the time.

I leave mine on silent, however, my 2FA app is on the phone. Getting up to retrieve from another room at each auth request would be tiresome. Maybe time to get a Yubikey like device instead???

I’d advice setting up a password store[0] which does allow to get OTP codes right on the same device, but of course, it kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA but I still use it for not so important stuff.

[0] https://passwordstore.org

imo, as long as you combine "something you know" and "something you have," the effect is the same. So if you store your 2fa encrypted with a on your computer with a key only you know, it accomplishes the same thing.

Anyone who’s used Apple 2FA on a Mac would be familiar with this - you can take the code from the same computer you’re using to log on to the Apple service.

KeePassXC can handle TOTP on a computer. You can use KeePassDX on Android as well and keep them synced with Syncthing.

Bitwarden let's you use 2fa from your password vault if you pay $10/yr.

i have coworkers who get an old phone with nothing in it for the 2fa needs

There are desktop apps for 2FA

To be honest I only notice that with movies. Books are fine, TV show episodes are usually fine, but long movies I can have a hard time concentrating on. Maybe because I can easily change my reading speed to keep my mind occupied.

This is the explanation I believe.

It would be easy to say "today's movies aren't as interesting as the ones of 20 years ago" but that would be ignoring that I changed in those years - namely, I've seen a lot more movies and read a lot more books and watched a lot more TV.

It would be unsurprising for someone to say "not everything I liked at first still holds up today."

But I apply the same reasoning against my forward-looking watching/reading: "I've seen so much more now that fewer things impress me at first, as I have so much more to compare with."

So a book that's only mildly capturing my attention? I can speed up my reading, skim a bit more over the uninteresting parts. A movie? So much harder!

I have also found this to be the case. I can easily sit down and read something enjoyable for hours on end, but I try to watch a movie and within 20 minutes I'm wishing I was anywhere else. TV shows inhabit a kind of middle ground between the two, they're still tolerable but I find myself enjoying them less over time.

I can't say I really regret this change, I haven't noticed any real downsides. There's too much content and not enough time these days.

What about older movies? I watched movies from the 90s and they were great and able to keep my attention very well. Almost every modern movie though I can barely stay awake for the first 20 minutes..

I think Movies just suck because TV shows are where all the good production is happening.

Making a good and compelling movie is really really hard, and now you can just churn out superhero stuff and make millions or do a TV show and have nearly none of the constraints of cinema.

A lot of modern movies feel like slightly higher budget TV shows. There’s still some truly great stuff, but oftentimes I’m wondering where the 200 million dollars went. I feel like movies are increasingly being made for a TV screen and streaming services, so a lot of the grandiose nature of older movies is fading.

The 90s was an odd period with countless great movies and massive budgets.

same. I wish Amazon would allow rental of a movie for 2 weeks so I could watch a film in small segments. I no longer rent movies at all because often the running time is too much to complete in just 2 days.

I've found myself using speedup controls to watch movies and TV shows faster and it's actually helped me concentrate on them more as there are fewer "lulls" where I'll pick up my phone or something.

It doesn't help that most movies (these days? Always?) are not worthy of attention.

45 years old here. I usually go to the theater for a proper appreciation of the movies (big screen, no solicitations). Last movie I saw was Charlie Chaplin's City lights. Downloaded it for my kids (the exact kind of public for this film). They stayed in front of the TV set for 15 minutes before wanting to play yet another game of Hearthstone. Shame...

Yes, shame! That film is wonderful.

I see that as a pure contextual behaviour. Let's say I switch Internet off and let them watch the same movie, and they will stay focused during the whole 87 minutes.

I remember this start with me in about 2009... used to watch movies all the time, now i can hardly finish 1.

That is a ridiculous claim.

Attention is a task dependent context. I can drive for hours with no incident but be bored by a meeting in 5 minutes. Very little to link the two, because they're not the same by any metric outside of time. To average that out is oversimplying to absurdity.

Secondly, this myth has been debunked _thoroughly_. I don't have offhand access to the papers but I will add some write ups about it. But the state of attention report report 2018 is a good place to start if you feel like a Google hunt.

Third, most all of the theories around a shrinking attention span are based on unreplicated drivel. And it is drivel. Psychology is a new field still figuring out it's limits and medicine predates science and has a lot of falsehoods-presented-as-fact (this is a huge problem and contributes to the rise of anti vaxxers). Not a lot of evidence so much as opinions.

I find the idea that I comprehend something less than if i had it on paper to be hilarious. I grew up on screens, maybe I'm just accustomed to it, but i have decades of learning mundane and complex subject matter via various tech portals. There is so much evidence that this happens on a large enough scale to dismiss this nonsense here and now

If I couldn't go more than 10 seconds without checking I'd think I had a severe addiction and seek treatment

There is great book about this called Stolen Focus https://stolenfocusbook.com/

Are we really going to ignore the fact that this was written by a notorious plagiarist and dickhead, Johann Hari?

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