#012 | Attention vs Consideration Span

Hi, I’m Ryan! You are receiving this because you have signed up to my weekly newsletter for Natural Language Processing (#NLP365), Entrepreneurship, and Life Design content!

March 28, 2021

Hey friends,

I had an interesting conversation with a friend this week and we were talking about how most people in today’s world seems to have shorter attention spans.

This was partly driven by how social media has been encouraging shorter form content. Medium.com popularise short-form articles in the range of 2 - 5 minutes reading time. TikTok, Instagram Reels, Stories, Tweetstorms, Youtube Shorts, and so on are all short-form contents. These platforms encourage people to post shorter form content by using algorithms that favours them!

Recently, I noticed how this short-form content has been translated to books. You now have books that are 60+ chapters long 🤣 in contrast to older books with less but longer chapters.

BUT THEN…

We asked ourselves: do we have shorter attention span or shorter consideration span? or both?

People have no problem focusing on things that they are interested in but only if that thing manage to grab their attentions in the first X seconds. And so with that said, that means we suffer mainly from shorter consideration span? Attention span isn’t a problem if we are interested in the things we are doing?

No immediate conclusion here to be honest. Just a thought experiment that I am currently exploring 😁 If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to reach out and share it! 👾

This week I finished reading:

  1. Pre-Suasion (22nd Mar - 25th Mar 2021)

  2. Inspired (26th Mar - 28th Mar 2021)

Total: 25 / 26 books | 2 / 26 level 4 notes | 2 / 12 actions

❓Question of the Week

Are you short of attention or consideration span?

Share your thoughts by replying to this email. I would love to hear from you! 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

Couldn’t agree more, don’t be impress by the number of books read! But that doesn’t mean don’t read a lot of books!

To find the ONE book that can deeply change you requires both luck and effort. You can’t control luck. You can control effort. Be selective with what you read but you still have to read lots and explore to find the few books that can heavily impact your life.

💡 Quote of the Week

Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn’t claim to be a monopoly. But is it one? Well, it depends: a monopoly in what? — Zero To One

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

We have launched our MVP for the Zeroton platform!!

Please check it out here @ https://beta.zeroton.io/.

Join Zeroton’s ACTION-FOCUSED Slack Channel — We are in the process of looking for STRONG ACTION TAKERS, who wants to self-improve themselves through non-fiction books, to join our slack community.

Through the slack community, you will have access to the following:

  1. Weekly group zoom calls with myself and other like-minded people to discuss actionable insights from different non-fiction books. We will keep each other accountable and share personal experience in testing different actions!

  2. Monthly Habits Challenge

To join our Slack community, click here.

🔦 AI Research - Spotlight

Three conclusions:

  1. Name regularity is critical for the models to generalise to unseen mentions

  2. High mention coverage may undermine the model generalisation ability

  3. Context patterns may not require enormous data to capture when using pretrained encoders

🎥 This Week on YouTube

That’s it for this week! I hope you find something useful from this newsletter. More to come next Sunday! Have a good week ahead! 🎮

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