They did not in fact find that the shorts are making you dumber. They said it affects your attention span.
Ironically I found this out in the first sentence of the article and then stopped reading.
YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are making you dumber, according to science
Submitted 2 days ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
victorz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah I can’t imagine it making me dumber. Most of my shorts are interesting scientific facts/discoveries. Or CSS tips and tricks.
Attention span I can definitely believe.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 day ago
This may shock you, but most people watch really dumb fucking shit instead of scientific facts.
JustinTheGM@ttrpg.network 1 day ago
Wouldn’t the knock-on effects of a reduced attention span pretty much look like ‘dumber’?
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Intelligence is intelligence you can’t reduce it by watching cat videos
Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
So do stupid fucken click bait headlines.
Yttra@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s Dexerto for you, business as usual for them.
fafferlicious@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
There’s a lot of people here unable to recognize how important attention span is for deep, meaningful learning.
Way too many people saying “ATTENTION SPANS NOT INTELLIGENCE DUHMASSES” and failing short because they don’t have the attention span to think of implications of decreased attention span.
Long term memory is built on repetition and attention. It is entirely plausible that short form media makes you stupider - by impacting your ability for deep learning
arcine@jlai.lu 1 day ago
50 people is an irrelevant sample size.
IratePirate@feddit.org 1 day ago
Hey there, fella! If it confirms my biases, sample size is irrelevant. Science has spoken! /s
DonPiano@feddit.org 20 hours ago
No, it’s not. Standard error of the mean estimate is SD/sqrt(n-1), so it depends on the signal/effect to noise ratio how much you can learn from it. SE of the mean difference for a between subjects design is slightly different but not miles off from that. You can squeeze even more info out of it by using within subjects designs.
What makes you think a sample size of 50 is irrelevant?
zewm@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yea but how many likes and subscribes does it have tho? 🤔
JeffreyOrange@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Those things are ADHD honeypots. I have never experienced something that is so close to hard drugs before.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It started way back in the days of cable. I remember how jarring it was to see a music video on MTV that kept changing camera shots. I was like, “you don’t even get enough time to get a good look at the band or the scene.” Then it got worse, way worse.
They have been programming people for short attention spans forever now and I hate it.
FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I mean this doesn’t establish a causal link at all, just confirms the obvious fact that someone with attention issues is more likely to consume short form content.
confuser@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I think I figured out the dynamic at play here.
Its basically that context switching is costly and since the internet has our attention/context switching spread thin between things like admin/messaging/learning/etc constantly we make our bandwidth really small so usually by the middle of the day our brains are fried if we changed contexts a lot even if we didn’t do much, and what’s worse is that to compensate for feeling like e didn’t do much we may just doomscrolling more to feel like we gained something so it just spirals and gets worse unless we do something about it.
What I suggest we do is recalibrate to having our baseline be as dead simple in terms of relaxing as sitting still staring at the wall or something, doing almost nothing, and then if we want to do something it should be something that we can steadily do for a couple hours at a time, anytime we have something to do later such as socials on a phone or something to google later we should note it down somewhere and eventually we create a todo list of those sorts of things that will last a couple hours so that we can do that without much context switching, and if we still need to recalibrate we can always top and be still for some time.
At first this seems less fast but it is actually more fast because you gain more higher quality time in which we are working more efficiently at whatever we may be doing at any moment.
We aren’t getting dumber by using the internet, we are just getting very biased towards information overload.
kinship@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
I am on the same path. I used to write down to-do lists but stopped, need to get back on it.
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
They said the same thing about Sesame Street in the 1970’s
I turned out all right.
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
WOW! 3 downvotes for saying I’m all right.
And no stated reason. Could be a troll farm. A Russian troll farm, or maybe a Christian troll farm. They don’t like me thinking too. It might be my EX, we still don’t get along.
I could even be Nestlé. My DECADES-long boycott is finally working.
lath@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Ah, you too live in a trash can and crave cookies?
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 day ago
I mean… looking at Shorts and Reels it’s definitely now making anyone smarter. There’s 0 value to it.
Duranie@leminal.space 1 day ago
I’d say it depends. I’ll admit to spending inconsistent amounts of time a day on shorts. Some days none at all, but some (typically stressful) days I’ve probably lost 1-2 hours. The content I’m getting is mostly cooking, horror movies/gaming, education, and health and fitness related. Through it I’ve found content creators with podcasts and have found some motivation to make exercise an achievable part of my daily life.
Is there a sea of toxic bullshit out there? Absolutely. But there’s also some freshwater lakes and rivers. It’s why media literacy needs to be included in education along with critical thinking.
Engywuck@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
No, they are making you dumber. I don’t use YouTube/Instagram/TikTok at all nor any other video/short platform.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 day ago
Same. I’m getting smarter relatively speaking.
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
Wow, imagine how smart you would be if you spoke all the time.
kokesh@lemmy.world 2 days ago
No shit
tostos@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Iconoclast@feddit.uk 2 days ago
I’m sure the title here is accurate summary of the conclusion of the study and I don’t need to even check because as a person who doesn’t conscume short-form media this confirms something I already know to be true about myself.
etherphon@piefed.world 1 day ago
Curious about memes as well.
dewritoninja@pawb.social 1 day ago
Yeah cause Ibuprofen
starchylemming@lemmy.world 2 days ago
eh. good luck. i am already
jordanlund@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Nvermind@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
No.
If you have less self control, you’re more likely to consume more short-form video content (duh). But correlation is not causation and the study is not proving that more short term video content is causing less self control. It probably is, but that’s not the finding of the study as the title and some of the quotes imply.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Neither does impulse control and attention span imply anything about intelligence. Framing it like this is kinda offensive to the many smart people who have a flavour of adhd.
Previous Science regarding gaming habits of young kids concluded that they had improved problem solving skills, cognitive skills and also lower attention span.
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 1 day ago
When we’re talking science, if you have a certain flavour of adhd which makes you less intelligent, it still makes you less intelligent. Nothing to be ashamed of, and of course the ways they define and test for intelligence are often questionable. But worrying about offending people or making test score equitable goes against the principles of objective science.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
also, short attention span ≠ low intelligence, as the title implies
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 day ago
I can see how a short attention span could foster behavior that leads to lower intelligence. Will be hard to prove scientifically though.
Yliaster@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Further, self-control and attention span are not measures of intelligence.
You can be restrained and/or have a long attention span and still not be intelligent.
Zephorah@discuss.online 2 days ago
To be fair though, there’s commercial/ad feel to shorts so it’s likely in that zone, though in need of better method to prove it.