I think most people just find it easy to put a podcast and pay semi-attention on while they do tasks or go on their phone. And the education sector is having to adapt to that and make it possible for students to achieve good grades by learning like that.
Can they sustain their attention on dense and technical things at all, or when there is no grade involved?
Pointing to school grades is not really a good measure of "can these people actually digest and understand complex and longform information and narratives?" The relevance of that requirement should be obvious: at many points in your life you will need to manage boredom and your attention, to understand boredom and focusing for a longtime as a part of life and learning.
When I was a TA in uni 5 years ago, many students found reading anything longer than 8 pages to be interminable or downright impossible, which I found rather pathetic. They would give up. These were all kids who got excellent grades. They couldn't accept or manage their boredom at all, even if it was just a part of learning to do things. They constantly wanted summaries, which to my mind is worse --- they wanted someone to tell them what and how to think about something without engaging with that thing themselves. We all have to do that sometimes, of course; but, we should not expect that to be the default. What they lacked more than anything was intellectual curiosity.
That’s sad. There are many times in life one will need to do what is essentially the equivalent of reading a boring book and these kids are being set up for failure.
When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.
I remember struggling to read dense texts at university. As I've aged and read more, I'm pretty comfortable in the belief that most of the stuff i had to read wasn't that good and was just a boring slog purely because the author liked writing words.
Writers like writing, Readers like reading, and sometimes what they both would benefit from is a ruthless editor to focus their effort.
Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything.
> Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...].
Proof needed. You can't just say that.
> I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology.
The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics.
And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that.
</old man yells at cloud>
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
No wonder therapists are raking it in and short supply.
For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test ever. Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe. Everything was problems, proofs, or essays.
Also I found videos to be of enormous value to learn visual tools like CAD. Just watching someone do the job and explaining how they do it lets you fill the gaps that theoretical education leaves open.
The kids who actually have curiosity will use the internet to speed way, way ahead of anything we've seen before. They will use the resources in the "right" way: getting access to more materials, getting better feedback, getting more motivation from social groups.
The same device will be used by everyone else to just feed addictions: more videos about useless crap. More time spent simply tickling mental itches, getting more and more exposed to things that are very harmful.
1. In my experience, there is a lot of introductory material to be found, but I find there are distinctly fewer people discussing more advanced topics, or they are much harder to discover.
2. Audio/Video just isn't as information-dense as a book can be.
3. YouTube and podcasts tend to be much more "infotainment" than "education". And sure, we can find lectures on there, but students get lectures in school too.
Really I spend my days shovelling PDFs around.
Not just the critical part described in an article
Is your evidence for this assertion constrained to your observations of your younger relatives?
Certainly 'excellent grades' may not be linearly correlated with deep learning, but I'm curious how you correlate 'years spent mastering' with LLMs.
Of course, if you stop just after the podcasts/YouTube, you end up with a biased map of a subject which ends up probably not being very useful if you want to apply that knowledge successfully.
Most schools will only ask for the first part, so that is enough for the kids. But I mean, they were already doing similar things beforehand to avoid having to study dense books...
In 1400, actually reading books deeply was for autistic weirdos who were usually sent to monasteries. In 1950, you could actually mention reading literary fiction on a job interview and it would help, rather than hurt, you. In 2024, actually reading books deeply is for autistic weirdos again and “well-adjusted” people realize that their ability to afford food and housing relies on the use of information to form a collage beneficial to one’s personal image—not deep understanding of high-quality information, and certainly not the high-risk generation of anything new.
Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?
There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.
I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.
From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.
If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.
The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.
> excellent grades
have nothing to do with interiority -- the main thrust of the article
It makes me kinda sad. Videogames need voice acting now to become successful because nobody has the reading or concentration skills. When I was a child I taught myself English by playing Planescape Torment.
The problem is that while YouTube and ChatGPT will get you through high school and perhaps a year of university, you'll eventually reach a point where you need information that is only available in dense books. And if you haven't learnt that skill of reading dense books, you have a problem.
There was actually an article in the newspaper just today about how a record number of university students in Sweden are struggling and failing because they are simply incapable of reading and extracting the necessary information needed from the textbooks.
And yeah, no matter what note-taking and productivity software I try I still end up longing for pen and paper. Sometimes I think scanning my notes and tagging them might be a good enough compromise.
I number the notebook, and write the start date at first page. Then I number the pages as I go, and date every page.
When the notebook finishes, I remove the binding, scan it at 600DPI, store it as a PDF.
I'll be training a local Tesseract installation with my hand writing one day, but I'm not there. However, these notebooks saved the day more than once in their current form.
I'm using smart devices since Palm/Handspring era. Nothing can replace the paper for me, and I don't want to change my ways from now on. So this is the method I use for quite some time.
E.g watching developer write software can show you things about OS usage, IDE usage, automation and other tricks and habbits
On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation, because more than just the test has changed since that time. For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are the present-day students being taught to a test from four decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would need to control for in order to accurately compare performance over time. Although there are certainly people who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance. What do people need to know now, and what books should be read by students in order to learn it?
"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.
"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.
In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.
You can connect with other learners, you can ask questions on forums.
But can pupils from 30 or 40 years ago pass today's exams?
You could as well have written that you know young people who get excellent grades because they pay the smart kid to do their school papers.
Or constant stream of information gives them the illusion of staying informed
Video games seem to be aiming to inspire strong emotion through realism, not writing. I won’t say the quality of the writing doesn’t matter but it’s not what makes a great game. Final fantasy games have really hackneyed plots and writing but do the game part extremely well. And video games are the best way to make a story accessible to a large number of people. I don’t think the written word puts a story into the center of a culture anymore.
The voice acting probably adds realism and accessibility but I agree that it also takes something away, just as no video game can do, intellectually and emotionally, what the written word can do. The fact that mere text had such an effect is part of the artifact. Sadly, I don’t how you tell teenagers, if you’re teaching language and literature, that people had the same strong emotional reactions to these texts we assign, that they have to video games.
Oddly enough I’m reading a fantasy novel right now by someone who used to be part of this community. It’s far better than I expected it to be, and it’s causing me to rethink a number of recent events I thought I understood.
Oh, also in another media from the same era and the same country : Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I only discovered this year and which hit harder than I expected). And it has a lot of Kabbalah symbolism in it ! Why ? The lead author basically says because it was exotic and cool... (I only now put two and two together for Sephiroth, but then I barely thought of him for the last couple of decades...)
Also, "podcasts" go quite a bit back : since it became practical to record radio (wire already, or did that only start with cassette tapes ?)
TV got that too with it's own tapes, but the portability and diversity was much worse until digital video got cheap enough.
The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done
Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?
From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/m...
PISA is a standardized test conducted by OECD for International Student Assessment. It's homepage is located at [0], alongside with datasets for all previous tests, and plethora of material.
So, you can download the data, look at the questions in any language you prefer, do your own analysis.
I'll just reiterate that, my personal experience mirrors the article. Extreme reliance of smart devices and technologies like conversational LLMs reduce the cognitive ability and deep thinking capacity tremendously. Children and people become interfaces to these devices they use. They just delegate all their thinking to these devices and live a much hollower life.