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There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more. Yes, there are costs -- deep work & study both suff

• Brusco_RF 3y ago
  I appreciate your optimism. A lot of people point out that education hasn't changed meaningfully in hundreds of years. Professors, long lectures, textbook readings, homework and exams. I am curious if this trend will be the catalyst for a new education systems to topple current status quo. You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory. I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified" engineering curriculum would look like.
  • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    > I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified" engineering curriculum would look like. That's what it already is, isn't it? It's not like Galileo could just read a small description on the Universal Law of Gravitation and understand what was going on. Think about explaining solving a linear system of equations vs using a matrix inverse to calculate a solution. As phenomena become better understood, we literally condense disparate observations into more general rules and theories that offer us more clarity and understanding. I like to follow a bunch of woodworkers on TikTok and once the algorithm gives you the right set of people, you can use the quick videos of how they setup jigs or some interesting joinery they do and riff off it in your own work. Sure if I were a beginner it would be different, but it's a very useful resource for someone with experience.
  • csomar 3y ago
    > You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our upward trajectory. This happened a while ago and the solution to that was specialization and not tiktokization. As much as I am for modernizing, uhm, everything, I'm not sure I see an advantage in the current trend that's happening right now. Quality have been declining on the software side, but that's only because I am exposed to that as a software developer. Everyday items quality are on the decline too (my Nike -will be the last ones- shoes have deteriorated in the interval of 3 months, just ridiculous). So here we have it: a combination of short-span attentions, a system that rewards the short-term and a political class that does not care. It's a mystery how our societies have not collapsed yet. Or maybe we are close?
  • balder1991 3y ago
    If there’s one thing I internalized about learning is that consuming content and reading doesn’t mean learning. In fact, nowadays, if I want to learn something I make summaries with my own words and create pages where I connect other stuff I think are related to that concept. (discussing it with ChatGPT is also a way to practice handling the subject in a back and forth conversation) “Compressing” content to the bare minimum to be quickly consumed in 30 seconds can be good for news or being aware something exists maybe, but it’s terrible for learning. If you’re not actively engaged in a task and struggling with it you’re not learning anything new.
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    One thing has changed dramatically in education over just the past 100 years. This [1] is an entrance exam for Harvard in 1869. It was expected that the applicant would be fluent in Greek, Latin, English, that they would have a exceptional grasp of history and geography across the entire world, be able to carry out complex mathematical calculations, compose geometric proofs, and more. That trend also was the same as you went down to high school and even middle school. The reason the curriculums were like this is that education was largely optional, and so it was designed for the exceptional over-achievers who would voluntarily, with no extrinsic force, opt into such. Now a days education, including tertiary, is designed for anybody with a pulse. And this creates a terrible scenario for overachievers and underachievers alike. The overachievers are bored senseless in lengthy classes because "Yes, I got what you said 40 minutes ago. Why can't we move on?" By contrast the underachievers lack the attention span and focus to follow a 50, let alone 90, minute lesson, so struggle even given the much slower pace. A 'TikTok-ified' education is really just a desire to stop wasting so much time, but we waste that time because of this change in education. And far from creating a nation of scholars - middling or otherwise, this change has instead just created a nation where your barista probably has a college degree, and 6 figures of debt to show for it. [1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
    • jonathanstrange 3y ago
      I have to disagree. Your example illustrates that the quality demands of Harvard entry have declined and it's reasonable to assume that other universities have also become more open, as you claim. You're right about that. Universities are less elitist than they used to be. Nevertheless, the overall demands in higher education have increased tremendously and the courses have also become more focused. In most disciplines, what formerly would have counted as a Ph.D. Thesis is nowadays at M.A. level. I've been in committees for hiring postdocs and Ph.D. students in the humanities, and it's insane what kind of demands are put on the students. I know some center of excellence in my discipline that (unofficially) requires one publication in a good international journal to be taken into consideration as a Ph.D. student. The majority of postdocs who apply for a one year grant nowadays have CVs that would almost certainly have made them assistant professors 30 years ago. There are also more courses and more subjects to learn because progress in science has accelerated very rapidly. For example, someone who studies CS nowadays will learn proofs in complexity theory that used to be cutting edge research 40 years ago. Overall, I don't buy your negative claims. Over-achievers can quickly finish their undergraduate studies and will move on. At most universities it is possible to cram your curriculum and exams and pass "easy" undergraduate courses very quickly. Lack of elitism is an imaginary problem, probably often made up for political reasons. If you want to see real problems, look at the high student fees, accompanying debt, and the resulting desire to focus on practical job skills and overly fast-paced studies. These are detrimental to science, of course.
• abyssin 3y ago
  Do you have an example of such a skill that has been compressed?
  • cwkoss 3y ago
    Recipe tiktoks are like 30 seconds long - faster to watch the whole thing than scrolling to find the recipe on a bloated blogspam recipe site.
    • deathanatos 3y ago
      I see recipes Tiktoks get readily debunked in longer-form content, such as by channels like "How To Cook That"¹; the Tiktoks amount to little more than content farming. What real information might be present is drowned out by fakes and bad advice that exist for no other reason than to soak up eyeballs. I get far more out of longer-form videos, IMO. (And yes, the bloated recipe blogspam is also a form that is rapidly approaching 0 bytes of information per byte transferred.) ¹(even this is "cheap" content, IMO; debunking stuff leaves the viewer back where they started, although How To Cook That specifically will occasionally show the "no, here's how you actually do this, and it takes less time than the tiktok's "time saver"." There's an endless stream of junk to debunk, so you don't really have to worry about running out, per se.)
      • gochi 3y ago
        Most longer form videos about food are half filler, mostly to appease youtube ads.
      • cwkoss 3y ago
        Huh, the two recipes I tried came out great. Any examples of fake tiktok recipes? All the top "How To Cook That" debunking videos seem to be about other youtube videos or just weird food videos that aren't recipes.
        • Karrot_Kream 3y ago
          I follow some YouTubers that try to recreate TikTok recipes and most of them come out just fine. If you're an experienced cook, it's really easy to judge whether a recipe is gonna be decent or not.
• JPws_Prntr_Fngr 3y ago
  > An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second tiktok It's a thin illusion. Brain candy masquerading as real food. Those snap-cut tiktok cooking instructionals aren't teaching my girlfriend to cook the dishes any more than a snap-cut BJJ youtube short could teach me how to do a berimbolo. She's gonna have to read a recipe and spend hours in the kitchen, and I'm gonna have to spend hours on the mat with a training partner.
  • Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    She's gonna have to read a recipe and spend hours in the kitchen You are missing the point. Something might take hours in the kitchen to make, but you don't need to have the entire thing on video. I don't need to see someone make all the shapes with the bread. I don't need to see them wait 45 minutes for something to cook. Most recipes aren't hours long. Most of them are a list of ingredients and a few short paragraphs: Most online recipes reflect this as well. And if someone is really unfamiliar, they can look up additional resources. "Best way to dice an onion" or "how to peel a tomato" both have plenty of videos. I'm going to guess that it is the same for a berimbolo: You don't need to watch hours of someone else on a mat. You just need the instructions so that you can do the practice - just like you don't need to watch someone else practice an instrument, but you might be helped see how they play basic stuff.
• colechristensen 3y ago
  But also now I have a magical machine in my pocket where I can tap the screen a few times and get a book read to me sped up to my optimal input speed. Those two things (audiobooks on my phone, the default feature to enable play at 2x-3x speed) have vastly increased the information I absorb. Now if only someone could come up with a screen/document reader with a decent text-to-speech and decent content filtering, it would be truly magical (read just the bulk text not and don't vocalize every single piece of text, most of which are major distractions to flow and don't need to be read) Part of the reason I'm learning a bunch of ML things is so I can make this for myself. On that topic, does anyone know of a really good, open, text to speech model? All of the ones I have been able to find have ranged between garbage and mediocre, none near "good enough" for the thing to be useful to me.
  • lotsofpulp 3y ago
    You can listen and understand faster than you can read and understand? I am far quicker at reading than listening.
    • trailingComma 3y ago
      Some people are visual learners. Some people are auditory learners.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • teddyh 3y ago
        No they aren’t; that’s been debunked: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Learning_styles&oldid=1156699831 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Learning_styles&o...
    • rustyminnow 3y ago
      Though reading is more efficient, perhaps they just have more time to listen to audiobooks to the point it is more total information gathered. Multi-tasking for the win!
• mlyle 3y ago
  The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action. I don't know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time. It's a very strong correlation. (And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we're accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don't have time to adequately question is high). Developing some skills requires focus and careful study. We're robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.
  • rjzzleep 3y ago
    TL;DR if we keep the direct environment of our child clean and limit distractions she's calm, and focused. If we don't she gets whiny and somewhat unbearable. I'm raising a child right now and it's pretty simple to observe a few simple patterns: 1. if there is stuff in her visible range during any activity that is even mildly interesting she wants it and it distracts from any activity. be it her own scooter, or her own toys lying around. denying her access to it makes her upset. 2. if there is any food in her visible range, cookies, fruits, anything, while eating dinner, she wants it and it makes feeding harder. denying access to it will make her upset and scream. 3. if there is a screen of any sort or a bright light on she will stare at it. denying her access to it makes her upset unless I turn it off and put my devices away. 4. We don't have a TV so she enjoys books a lot and we have improved our eating habits which makes it A LOT easier to feed her the same her healthy food. 5. Grand parents think they should bring a bunch of gifts every time they visit meaning our place is filled with junk, infinite amounts of clothes and they get upset when they don't get to gift it much like the kids that receive them. What I'm trying to say it that even taking away all the digital distractions, a lot of these simple things are things I and many people around me did not have in abundance as a child. It's not just because the digital stuff that attention spans decline. It's because EVERYTHING is noisy. Even the children books and toys are flashy and noisy. It's not like you wake up one day and have attention or not, it's something that is learned over long periods of time. How is any one supposed to grow up learning focus with all that junk around? I think a lot of these things are designed to get attention from children. The toy, book, and even children clothing manufacturers compete with each other on attention, ultimately I would argue with the goal of making the biggest profits.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  > There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more. Attention span cannot be measured by what we don’t pay attention to. And there has always - always - been more information than anyone could process. I think it quite obviously is determined by how long we pay attention to things we chose to engage with. Clearly watching 15 second short clips instead of reading books has had a detrimental effect.
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    > reading books This rhetoric is partly why reading gets such a bad rap. So many people put "reading books" on a pedestal, and cite random educational studies on how the mere act of reading stimulates the brain and is beneficial in itself. But 90% of the books in this world are fucking boring to downright garbage and not worth reading for most people. Telling people to read "books" is as helpful as advising suburban kids to go "places" and see them stay home after the fifth trip to Wallmart. Would a random kid be better off reading "Rich dad Poor dad" than try to fix the brake cable of his bike ? Should they read "The Boys from Biloxi" or go to a theater with their friends and have an actual social exchange with a real human ? Are the dozens of self help books pusblished every week better than their Substack equivalent ?
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      They should definitely read whatever interests them so when they want to acquire useful knowledge (like what to do when the obvious brake cable fix doesn’t work), they have access to tons and tons of written material on that topic. It’s odd how you’re acting like you’re making an argument against the general imperative to read books, but your examples are people being requested to read specific books which may or may not be useful and/or interesting to the reader.
      • djangelic 3y ago
        I agree with what you are saying. Much like a muscle, when you work out, you're not lifting weights so you can lift more weights later. Your general strength is higher, so most physical tasks are easier. Same for reading, if you practice reading books and enjoy looking at the written word, then reading developer documentation doesn't seem as intimidating which opens more doors for you.
• idopmstuff 3y ago
  I'm reading a book on sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old, I think, and it's like 75% unnecessary. I attribute it to the fact that when it was out, there were fewer books/other media competing for attention, plus it wasn't easy to go find additional information by Googling, so people attributed value to extra, borderline-useless info in books.
  • d3ad1ysp0rk 3y ago
    "sleep training a baby that's ~20 years old" this book sounds hilarious
    • vacuity 3y ago
      "Two pitbulls attack girl returning home from school" Wow, they grow up so fast!
  • nunez 3y ago
    That still happens today. Gotta have enough filler to publish!
  • prawn 3y ago
    The method we leaned on (with success) was a one-page PDF shared by another parent. So many books of this sort are a bullet-point list fleshed out to justify the sale price, and little else. Case studies and history and whatever else.
• nunez 3y ago
  Yeah, but compression is lossy. The hour long video on a thing that covered most of the bases and edge cases gets cut down into a 30 minute (likely 15 minute) YT video with important information missing. The 15 min YouTube video turns into two 30 second TikToks that speed run through 70% of what you need to know, sure, but is the 30% they didn't cover (or know about!) actually important? Who knows! Example: I was cleaning our jacuzzi bath tub the other day. The previous owners had never cleaned it, so black gunk came out of the jets. A YouTube video (that was actually a TikTok!) suggested unscrewing the jet nozzles (amongst other things), which she demonstrated as a really simple "just unscrew them" sort of deal. As it happens, not every jet nozzle is meant to be removed! And not every jet nozzle should be removed! Also, it is really hard to get replacement nozzles after you crack one because it was affixed to the housing!
  • tetha 3y ago
    Yeah. I got myself a songwriting course and it's certainly not compressed, more like 20 - 30 hours in total length. And those guys do a lot of, let's call it, meandering in the topics. Like, one of the basic topics was time signature and time signature notation. And the basics are somewhat simple indeed, but after a minute or two, there's a detour into why german Volksmusik is different about on- and off-beats, and later on there was a detour into irish music and shanteys. This very much reminds me of some of the more advanced university classes - very much stringent about a topic, but entirely ready to look at the flowers left and right. And while it makes it longer, I find it helps my retention. For one, I have to allocate 40 minutes to an hour for a course part - and that's enough time to make it a conscious decision. And it helps to put new information into context much better, which very much helps retention. Heck, even something like a cat crashing into a keyboard helps remembering things, haha.
    • debok 3y ago
      Yeah, I have the same experience with retention. The extra time spent on the detours helps to contextualise the theory. To expand on your flowers analogy, looking at the flowers helps to remember the path better.
  • 3y ago
• acters 3y ago
  You are correct! We may be dismayed by how fast we approached new information (and thereby the speed of action), however, productivity has been steadily rising. On top of that, we are able to act and learn more variety than ever before. There are clear downsides and upsides to the speed. Overall, faster has shown to be better.
• princevegeta89 3y ago
  I think this is just a result of too many things grabbing attention - especially in almost everyone's career this seemed to be the norm for the last 15 years or so. The jobs we do, the tools we use, and the structuring of companies and employee hierarchy, projects and general culture have all introduced elements that force you to frequently context switch all the time. Add to that, things on the internet like Social Media, apps pushing useless notifications all the time, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, etc where things are updated very frequently and if you're participating on those platforms, it creates somewhat of an urge to keep checking new stuff as it comes. Engineers can choose to have some flexibility, however the managers and upper managers have no breaks, and it kind of sucks for them to zoom in and out of contexts between meetings, and it often makes them lose track of things. If workload is not shared, it very quickly becomes a shitshow altogether. All my managers in my last 3 companies were struggling to keep up with what was going on, and had no rest; they would get pinged about issues even while they were on PTO which seemed inevitable. Other high context-switching jobs may be those of doctors, stock brokers and analysts (they have to keep tracking a million things every day), lawyers, and sales guys. They come with their own way of causing mental overload quite frequently unfortunately. Honestly I feel it's the circumstances some of which are in our control that can be adjusted to minimize distractions and remove some of the useless things that we think are not needed at all. It's no wonder that those "distraction elimination" browser plugins and mobile phone apps are a real thing!
• hef19898 3y ago
  >> informational content that can be compressed does get compressed I think every single SEO content farm, and food receipy blog, would disagree with that.
  • lmpdev 3y ago
    On a long enough time scale I'd wager low quality/unoptimised content suffers from data decay much faster than concise, correct content This may be part of the reason Google presenting irrelevant SEO drivel all the more infuriating for users
• darkclouds 3y ago
  > An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second tiktok, > it's beautiful to see. I totally agree. Fleshing out subject matter is seen everywhere, films, books, education, and what the internet has delivered is near instant communication, and access to a much wider array of knowledge and things to see and do. More people can travel the world with ease and relative low cost, so why not try to be more informed about the laws and culture. When I look at a country that I might want to visit, I have never seen a TL;DR of their laws for inhabitants or tourists, so that puts me off travelling because I dont want to fall foul of the law. I have however been able to establish that some parts of the German Autobahn has no speed limit when conditions permit, and there is extra car insurance which can be purchased if one is wanting to drive at faster than normal speeds. The same goes for driving on the Nordschleife, there is an extra insurance option available to purchase in case an accident happens when driving around there. Considering all the tech and knowledge that exists and Google, the information is still incredibly fragmented, but some of the older professions like law and medicine rely on this knowledge being fragmented in order to justify their existence and I think it gives away their subconcious bias.
• onetokeoverthe 3y ago
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• xnx 3y ago
  Yes! The Tiktok format has been fantastic for getting creators to consider what the core of their messages is and edit out everything else. A well-made Tiktok video watched 5x is more valuable than a 10 minute YouTube video where the camera is left running and filler added just to pad out the monetization minimum time.