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Comment by meowkit | Hacker News Reader

...it is more fundamental.

It's Moloch - the optimization for one criterion (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) on the grandest scale. It's attention in the "attention economy", but attention is just signal for revenue opportunity, which is profit extraction aka the optimizing measure for Capitalism.

Too be clear, I am not even against Capitalism. Its been a powerful tool for driving market economies, and in conjunction with social justice it has risen all boats. The problem now is that it's been eroding foundational societal elements that make contemporary society (and Capitalism itself) possible in the first place... like attention, science, community, political sense-making, and more.

This is different from, but related to, Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).

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> market economies

One particular market economy is well ahead of the others in the experiment to erode democracy. In the marketplace, truth, fact, lies, and propaganda are all just information.

But democracy depends on education and instruction. These two critical types of information are undermined by for-profit purveyors of falsehood. The dysfunctional cycle is complete when people themselves crave the lies and propaganda more than they want the truth and facts.

Belief is repeatedly rewarded; critical thinking becomes an ancient habit that only the signatories of the constitution appear to have exercised.

This is a result of capitalism with unlimited credit-based money supply.

Modern interment businesses rely on the equation CAC < LTV, that is, “is the cost of acquiring a customer less than the lifetime value?” If so, they’ll spend money on advertising and this support an attention-based feed.

The fact that advertising now leads to increased revenues, which can be used as a basis for credit, completes the feedback loop.

With money creation coming from credit, interest rates can be unreasonably low. Bond yields, even for dismal companies, have been ludicrously low by historical standards. Advertising being a tool to turn money into revenue streams, anything that produces an emotional response will be monetized to the extreme.

A company can raise case by borrowing at essentially zero cost, use this cash to buy ads, and increase the demand for attention.

With fixed money supply, the interest rates wouldn’t get nearly so low. That would reduce demand for advertising because the cost of borrowing the money to acquire a user might exceed the LTV of the user.

If I say: Then attention becomes more valuable under Capitalism, so a siginficant portion of people will choose to have low screen time? Think of a "Deep Work" Movement or so.

I don't intend the above to be read as a would-be theorem in economics ("if-then"), I just want to know how you reason here.

> Then attention becomes more valuable under Capitalism, so a siginficant portion of people will choose to have low screen time?

I'm not the person you've responded to but i don't think that these sentences are logically connected.

If the former is true then the hustle to get this attention will become even stronger, increasing the attention economy. Unless you're not talking about valuable in a momentary manner, but that would mean you've moved on from capitalism.

I don't know, it implies people would be more conservative with their attention if they had some better way to spend it. I mean, there are obvious ways like studying or being with good family and friends or exercising, but they're hard or undesirable for x/y/z. Maybe some of these difficulties are an inherent part of the value, sometimes it's probably not.

Technology should be modulating these difficulties, and instead some of it is short circuiting our more basic emotional systems. Lower hanging fruit. Though I wonder if the more difficult tasks that make us happier, more sustainable as individuals could be pursued in a purely capitalistic incentive scheme, provided it's viewed on a time scale of ten or twenty years instead of one. What businesses take such a long term perspective though?

I think the point is that if everyone is hustling for attention, the ability to do deep work becomes more valuable.

Humans are weird, attention isn't nearly the only way to make money, and in fact, attention itself _depends_ on these other ways to even exist.

Think of it like the rich. Even though they themselves would never build a road, nor do they value building a road, they benefit hugely from them, such that those who are able to build roads make money. And the less people there are that can build roads, paradoxically, the more valuable the ability to build roads becomes.

It's for these reasons that things are so cyclical, this too shall pass.

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