Comment by immibis

Low attention span isn't an illness. It's an adaptation to live in a world where information is available, even thrust at you, from all sides, but most of it has negative, zero, or very low positive value and there are no sources of consistently high quality.

When I visit Hacker News I don't click on every link and read it. I read the headlines and click on the interesting ones. But I don't even read the headlines - I skim them. I skip over "Rust Any part 3: we have upcasts" and go straight to the next item: "Everyone knows all the apps on your phone".

My email inbox is the same way. Because I get all this marketing stuff, newsletters, mailing lists, recurring invoices (for a successful payment that's about as important as reading a daily email about a successful cron job).

Why don't I unsubscribe from everything? Because sometimes they're interesting. So I have to skim the headlines and pick them out. I receive everything, then filter it. (I knew about Bitcoin in 2009, Talk to Transformer in early 2020, and CLIP/VQGAN in 2021. If only I had an ounce of business sense, though it's reassuring that nor do most other people)

This is the wrong mode for school, where they're trying to teach you something specific deeply. But someone who's only operated in this mode for their whole life isn't going to be able to turn it off just for school, right?

I think in the past we received information through a lot less channels - an unusually large amount would be two or three newspapers on your doorstep every day and five to ten monthly magazine subscriptions. And many of them had relatively limited scope - like magazines about gardening or weightlifting - so you could unsubscribe if you didn't like that topic. Reddit and Twitter and Instagram try to be sources of everything.