Dr. Cal Newport

We can fix those just like we can if you're gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something.

We don't say your whole brain got rewired for junk food.

It's like, no, you have this particular cue cycle that we have to work on.

So maybe I'm being optimistic there.

I mean, you know the brain better, but like it would be extraordinary if in like a 10-year period, right, your entire brain somehow got rewired in a way that it couldn't sustain focus anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think – I don't know what your take on this, but like do you think at the undergraduate level that we have just been – not explicitly, but just sort of implicitly professors in general, we have been just sort of slowly adapting the difficulty of what we're teaching, et cetera, because we – maybe there's a reduced cognitive focus capacity, which is like the key skill for this sort of very artificial thing of learning complicated college-level work.

I think this would be an interesting experiment to find out is have we been implicitly having to sort of simplify things to keep, roughly speaking, grade distributions where normatively we feel comfortable?

I mean do we see this signal yet?

That's my interest.

Do we see this signal yet if we look back a generation 20 years ago versus now?

Yeah, I mean, TikTok...

In particular, like I think something – what people get wrong about TikTok is they think that there was a real algorithmic innovation, which is actually not the case.

Like as far as I understand, the machine learning algorithm underneath TikTok is probably like a relatively standard sort of multi-armed bandit intermittent feedback reinforcements algorithm.

All they did is they cleared out all the other noise.

So if you're Facebook or something like this, you're trying to use algorithms to curate things, but you have all these other legacy structures you also have to try to satisfy.

There's friends and you want to show stuff that your friends like more than other people and there's groups you're joining.

TikTok just got rid of all the noise.

And so we're just going to, all we're doing is optimizing watch time.

We think, we don't know, but we think watch time is the main thing that they're optimizing.