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   Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 00:04:00 JST Cat Hicks

   Here's a particularly funny methods thing that you can get fooled by that I was thinking about because of a piece on this controversy

   It's really popular to claim "our attention spans are shrinking", and this can be supported by graphs showing people's capacity to attend during rigorous intellectual work dropping by minutes over the years

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 00:04:00 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     There are usually multiple slippery arguments being made when you see hype-fear about this though:

     - they're often making leaps to all sorts of attention like sustained attention (measured in hours, like watching a movie), from the type of rigorous focus that we've always only measured in minutes

     - but more importantly, often what's happening is we've just refined how we measure problem solving focus in those minute by minute methods

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 00:04:16 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     So you can have earlier work that lands at a population estimate like "oh, it seems like people's tight focus on a problem solving task fatigues by about ten minutes"

     And then a later improvement in methods is like "we see signs of fatigue more like seven minutes"

     And then the headline is: ALL BRAINS ARE MELTING WE ARE DOOMED

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Sep-2026 00:05:58 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Now there are identifiable trends in cognition over the years but the truly well evidenced ones are almost always about SES and other types of effects that we know quite well (eg the less a society takes care of its children we will see that show up in their test scores etc)

     But watch carefully for slippery chains of argument about any isolated cognitive capacity

     This has been a methods PSA from your local psychologist 🫡