Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
2022
Crown / Random House

This is a subject that interests me: I find it's become a lot harder to concentrate on work (or anything) in the last 20 years with the rise of emails, tweets, Slacks ... as we're expected to respond to all of these immediately. I'm far from the first to have noticed this. This is a well-reviewed and popular book on that exact subject. Hari opens with his own experience of the problem, presented in a slightly hysterical style: "OMG, I can't think straight and society is broken!" But okay, he's setting the scene. And then he starts to detail his own initial attempt to isolate himself from the Internet to spend time reading and writing.

But at 30 pages in, I made the mistake of looking up Johann Hari. Hari has a very interesting history: he was a journalist who was run out of the profession for tampering with the facts (multiple times). I was dealing with his slightly histrionic style, I wanted to find out how to focus better, I could even deal with his bad history and give him the benefit of the doubt ... but notes at Wikipedia indicate that he has again (in this book) tweaked the science to better suit his own narrative. And you don't do that to me. Sure, current scientific theories may be proved wrong, or different, in months or years - but it won't be by you, Mr. Hari, and you don't get to change what it says to suit yourself. I won't be finishing the book.

For those who aren't familiar with me: I was a Mechanical Engineer in a previous life, and one of the pieces of that education that really stuck was Empiricism. Don't fuck with the science.