Comment by Neywiny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Neywiny | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for others, but I do know that my screen time is filled with this news feed and engineering or other STEM videos. I could never study, it just didn't work for me. But I have a good memory so watching videos tangential to my field helped. I ended up with straight As in my last years of uni, supported by 40+ hours/week of YouTube. Still not sure if that's accounting for 2x speed.

There's a lot of nuance to this. They should consider what we're "staring" at. Is it AI slop content like our parents seem to enjoy? Or more than that? Likewise for social media: maybe consider why in a society where it's prohibitively expensive to do anything and there's a loss of third spaces people are turning to online connections. And beyond that, connections to people from different backgrounds and locations. I can talk to somebody from the other side of the planet online without effort. We can learn of eachothers' hardships and experiences instantly. I think this got shown very well when rednote happened and American + Chinese teens/young adults mixed together en masse for the first time.

I worry that as a smart person you are too optimistic about what your fellow youths are staring at. TikTok and its copycat short vertical video sites are primarily full of content designed to make you dumber, whether it’s prurient content, simplistic and stupid political/cultural takes, or fads. And it of course comes with a joke of a promise that if you waste your own time making the same garbage, then you too can have a career as an “influencer”! I don’t think any of this is giving the benefits your YouTube viewing has.

"The Stare" is IMHO not the stare at a phone, but the response to a question.

Other people have mentioned this to me — that Gen Z and younger millennials are likely to fix you in a stare when answering a question.

Bit of a rant incoming:

This is a Gen X teaching failure. As kids we were taught to face front and look at the teacher when they were teaching, and in the era of fears of poorer attention, "attention-focussed" teachers have mistakenly extended this idea that looking the teacher in the eyes when answering is better, when it is worse.

The teacher thinks they have the pupil's attention: they do! But the pupil is supposed to be answering the question: that is where their attention should be.

Kids who do now have trouble directing their attention are not going to do better at answering the question this way, because they are wasting it. As long as the kid is making an attempt to answer the question, teachers should let them stare at the ceiling or a blank wall.

> half of it is spent staring at a screen

That's what I was referring to. Not the Gen Z stare.

Right, sry

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