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Comment by msb | Hacker News Reader

"An overabundance of rabbits leads to a shortage of lettuce."..."a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

Herbert Simon talked about this when we were still sending men to the moon [1].

This should be the charge of HCI practitioners, but the needs of consumers have largely been ignored. AI might provide some relief (my phone is getting better at learning when not to disrupt me...but it has a long way to go), but mostly I think it is up to us to close, ignore or turn away. What I fear the most is that by choosing to do so leaves us appearing lazy and/or disengaged in important professional and personal situations.

[1] http://zeus.zeit.de/2007/39/simon.pdf

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My feelies (feelings i have that i will now pass along like they were facts) tell me that smart phones help people to avoid thinking about hard things. http://imgur.com/gallery/AD84Z6V They help in the above as a distraction.

Outside of doing my banking, my smart phone does not help. its small and expensive, brittle, distracting. It exposes a lot of information about me externally. And people expect me to be available because of it.

I switch to a feature phone a while back for simple robustness. Now when i want to know the weather I just look up.

The HCI practitioners learned all their tricks from the gambling industry. Poker machines and smart phones are really similar in the reward cycle that the trap you in.

> Herbert Simon talked about this when we were still sending men to the moon [1].

Cool, thanks for sharing. It's sobering to realize when people have already discussed things we face today

> mostly I think it is up to us to close, ignore or turn away.

Yeah. I feel like there are some successful people who say that stopping doing things is as important as doing things. Or, they say giving up control is useful. For every time that you are able to give up control, you can move comfortably to a new role within an organization. Giving attention to all the news can be seen as a form of control we're attempting to exert on the world, says me, another guilty person

> What I fear the most is that by choosing to do so leaves us appearing lazy and/or disengaged in important professional and personal situations.

That's fear of missing out talking. Tell him to shut it :)

>That's fear of missing out talking.

I think it is more a fear of managing expectations than a fear of missing out. When instant communication is the norm, choosing not to instantly communicate being perceived as neglect, for example. While in reality, you simply need to block the distractions for a few hours to get work done.

> While in reality, you simply need to block the distractions for a few hours to get work done.

Oh, I see. I suppose that depends upon your relationship with coworkers/clients. My expectation is that people around me understand that anything less than a phone call or in-person request does not demand immediate attention. If they don't, that's their problem. I've never had someone fire me for letting an email go a few hours. They might ask about it, and then I would just reply I was focused on something else. Pretty understandable in my opinion, and if not, again that isn't my problem.

That said, I think being able to do context switches without losing work is an acquired skill. There are people who can do it in conversation; when interrupted, they can come back to the original where it left off. I don't know of many people who switch between code and people but I believe it's possible to get good at it.

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