Post No.: 0886
Furrywisepuppy says:
There’s enormous competition from everywhere vying for our attentions. And video content generally grabs our attention far more effectively than walls of text. Yet even here, people’s attention spans with videos are low – it’s said that it takes only 8 seconds for an average person to decide whether or not to continue watching a video.
A lot of popular videos on the web present mindless content for us to ‘pass the time’ with. (A lot of crafty ‘life hacks’ don’t solve any real-life problems I’ve ever come across!) But there are also many videos that are educational and edifying too. Videos are great for learning particular skills (e.g. how to fix or make things in well-explained ‘how to’ videos). We can somewhat learn through the observation of others via ‘observational learning’. Watching someone else do something can vicariously activate some of the same neurons involved as if we were performing the same task ourselves. So, although it’s obviously not as deep and beneficial as actually physically attempting a task oneself – there is some learning experience gained via watching others do something, whether that’s a teacher who’s right in front of us or on a screen.
To confirm whether we’ve truly successfully assimilated the content though – we should personally perform or get tested on what we’ve just watched (e.g. try sewing a dress ourselves). This is essentially the same as seeing if we can pass an exam based on what we’ve apparently just been taught.
Alarmingly – divisive, sensationalised, emotionally-incendiary, oversimplified or dumbed-down, one-sided content grabs our attention and engages commentary, likes and sharing far more than the kind of nuanced and detailed educational content taught by reputable academic institutions.
And especially if the content concerns complex subjects like economic, political or behavioural theory – what we’ve absorbed could be a shallow understanding of a task or subject. And the problem with that is that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing – worse than knowing nothing at all i.e. that small amount of knowledge (that we won’t likely think is small because we don’t know there’s any more) can mislead us into thinking we’re more expert on a subject than we really are, which can result in us making mistakes or expressing hubris.
We’re less aware of – or we’re less likely to willingly acknowledge – the amount of stuff that we still don’t know (yet) hence we’ll think that the little we do know is all there is to need to know; and oversimplifications drive up the confidence in what we think we know. We can know enough to sound clever to those who know equally little or less, and that’ll boost our ego; but not enough to be humble towards those who know more.
Relatedly, just because we passively experience something, even every day, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll genuinely understand it (e.g. we eat food, watch TV, go to foreign countries, interact with others – but unless we’ve specifically learnt about something, it won’t necessarily mean we’ll know how to cook what we’ve eaten, know how to make television programmes, truly understand another culture (especially if we merely stay in the tourist traps), understand social psychology or even understand ourselves, what’s going on below or beyond our conscious or why we do what we do, for instance). One can learn some things by being passive, but what we learn this way can potentially be over-generalisations or wildly inaccurate, like the stereotypes we intuitively and unconsciously form and apply, and the cognitively easy ‘facts’ we blindly accept as true, via our ‘system one’. So even though it’s far more effortful – it’s better to, in a structured or at least disciplined way, learn subjects intentionally and actively i.e. engage our critical ‘system two’ via a formal academic course on the subject in question.
And how abbreviated can a decent education attempt to go until it’s no better than learning through a social media feed and the very common problem there where those who mainly obtain their news and education through social media sources suffer from ‘knowing only a little to be arrogant’? (If only we knew more to know how little we know before we bark about and spread our strongly opinionated views to others!) Attempted shortcuts to teaching and learning complex subjects can be compared to attempted shortcuts to getting physically fit and healthy. Oversimplifying a subject is often worse than not teaching that subject at all, for people can start to feel overconfident about what they think they comprehend. But often that’s not a concern for those who routinely post such content on social media – their goal is often precisely to spread a particular worldview and/or to capture clicks and ultimately make revenue.
Also, it can be somewhat like getting used to navigation apps and forgetting how to get comfortable with using paper maps (which don’t require batteries to operate in a more realistic survival situation) – an over-expectation of easy-consumption media like short videos might make us think that we can only learn if something is presented with colourful moving pictures, short sentences and other people reading stuff out for us! Videos are great for learning but we’ve also got to be or get comfortable with being able to learn from all kinds of media and presentations otherwise our comfort zones will be narrow, which of course will hamper our ability to learn in total.
Adults are often treated like kids – it’s like a parent slicing everything into small pieces to make a meal easier for a child to consume. Okay it’s not a problem with the presentation style (e.g. using cartoon characters, humour, music) – making learning more fun and more ergonomic to digest is fantastic for all ages – but when some videos think that these elements are enough or are a substitute for the quality of the research put behind the actual content, then that’s where the problem is. It’s like colourful packaging is sometimes used to sell nutritious food but it’s also, more frequently, used to sell junk food.
Convenience foods have weakened some people’s ability to cook because they don’t even feel the need to practise cooking. What makes something too easy for us makes us weaker in that department, and we’re only as strong as our weakest point or skill. It’s fine if these conveniences are always present, but they’re not. Sometimes we won’t have a calculator available to calculate a sum, or sometimes we’ll have to meet people face-to-face rather than behind an avatar. And we’ll know when we’ve over-relied on something when we find it difficult to do without it (e.g. when we’d rather avoid making an important call if we cannot just text someone). Our quality of life may decrease (e.g. if we lack confidence with languages).
And with non-real-time communications, like messaging apps or online forums, we can sound really clever by searching for answers inbetween replies, as if we knew that stuff inside our heads already. It’s not wrong to use the Internet in this way, and we do still need to know what to search for – but what we genuinely know is whatever we can reliably retrieve from our own memory banks. And an Internet connection and a long delay between replies aren’t always afforded to us in many real-life situations. We cannot always depend on having online access.
These are all examples of what’s called human-technology-created ‘enfeeblement’. People are gradually becoming more dependent on and useless without (easy, convenient) technologies in their lives. Humans won’t evolve into dumb slugs but will adapt to become weaker in their naked state, which will be fine as long as they’re not found naked i.e. without the relevant conveniences.
With the proliferation of smart phones and other gadgets – having the gear won’t necessarily mean we’ll have the idea either. Possessing a camera, being able to publish our views or make videos for the world to see won’t automatically make us worthy photographers, journalists or directors.
Like how those from generations before didn’t fret about walking to a shop a couple of kilometres away and back but nowadays more people would rather pop into a car to go just 500m away, or order online – nowadays most people would rather watch a (short-form) video and anything more ‘strenuous’ like reading a couple of thousand words is considered TL;DR or ‘too long; didn’t read’. Well the aversion isn’t really related to the length of time one needs to spend on reading technical or deep material because many people will readily spend hours per day perusing mindless content on social media or bingeing on box sets – it’s more about the effort. Hence it’s more accurately TE;DR or ‘too effortful; didn’t read’.
The problem is also being nonchalant about being abject at, say, maths yet being hyper-bothered about one’s hair! This cannot be where human societies are heading, can it?! (Well I suppose why put in the effort? Regardless of one’s level of education compared to others or whether one trusts in truths or falsehoods – one democratic vote counts the same as any other!)
Simplification is in demand though. And shouldn’t we give people what they want; what interests and engages them? But what we want isn’t always what we need.
Of course the quality of the stuff found on the web varies incredibly so there’s plenty of good education, and wholesomeness, out there. But there’s also plenty of bad. Courses from reputable academic institutions are far more consistently sources of good education. The media nicely supplements but cannot replace a concerted study of a major subject (e.g. it really helps to understand the differences between ‘armed forces’ and ‘armed groups’, or international wars and internal/civil wars, or to not misunderstand the term ‘military objective’, and other subtleties, in order to not misunderstand what a true expert journalist is precisely saying).
So study a course on a subject in question then you’ll understand what’s presented in the media much better. As you gain better knowledge on a subject yourself then you’ll also start to recognise when a contributor is a generalist rather than a subject specialist through the quality of the pieces they contribute to on the subjects they cover too. If we’re laypeople though then we won’t know the difference and it can become a case of the blind misleading the blind.
Too many ‘educational videos’ on video sharing platforms have clickbait titles and images to grab our attentions in an attempt to get noticed amongst the thousands of daily uploads. Another common tactic is purporting to know the ‘secrets’ of certain things or presenting themselves as the ‘true experts’ on a subject and knowing certain matters without doubts or nuance even though the scientific community itself cannot yet collectively definitively agree on the answers (e.g. why we dream and dream meanings). There are too many popular social media accounts that spread cod psychology despite calling themselves psychology ‘facts’. There’s plenty of cod psychology targeted at people who want to get rich quick, or adolescent boys who want to pick up girls.
Really, something that’s a ‘secret’ yet supposedly derived from scientific sources must be BS because it cannot have been derived from open, published and peer-reviewed scientific research! Or if it’s not really a secret then it just serves the point that these kinds of titles are clickbait.
…We’ve got to take the attitude that there are no reliable shortcuts to gaining sound knowledge. But we’re prone to desiring ‘quick fixes’ like we do with trying to lose weight. And like how our health can actually decline if we attempt some fad diets – our understanding of certain scholastic subjects can actually be misinformed if we think that we’ve understood a massive subject with a fraction of the effort. There are illusions of knowledge. There are techniques to improve our learning rate and retention but there’s no instant ‘I know kung fu’ trick; at least on the foreseeable horizon.
Woof.
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