Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

>This is an important question. This is perhaps the most important question for society to answer today. Attention translates to influence. What people pay attention to influences what they believe. What they buy. How they vote. What they fight for. That’s why autocrats try to control the media. It’s why companies pay billions in advertising.

Good luck. When I have talked to people about advertising in general, I've found that they just don't care. Apparently it is a very special mode of thinking where you consider your own attention valuable, attach anything more than 0 importance or cost to watching a message, worry about getting influenced (people will quickly think you are crazy when you choose this tack)... For sure I have found some people here and there who are sympathetic to this way of thinking, but if you want a wider debate about these sorts of issues I fear the first step is let go of your assumption that you can get people to consider your arguments at all if you'd just explain your reasoning clearly enough.

It’s not just attention. It’s time in general that people have no respect for; their own time, and the time of others.

In a way this is not new, you can read Seneca complaining about this in his essay On the Shortness of Life:

“Men do not allow anyone to take possession of their estates, and, if there is the slightest dispute about the limit of their property, they rush to pick up stones and weapons: but they allow others to make inroads into their life, even extending personal invitations to those who will one day possess it. No one is found who would be willing to divide up his own money: but when it comes to his life, each one of us gives others a share in it, and how many others!

…How many have plundered your life without you realising what you were losing?…You live as though you were going to live forever.”

I wonder if this is, in part, to the fact that we have an unknown quantity of time. It seems when people put a more finite value to it (through a prognosis, or even just regularly marking off 1 week of four thousand), they seem to attach more value to it. It seems to transition it from the abstract to the concrete.

"The only technology that you need is deadlines"

discused a few days ago..

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/deadlines-as-technology/

The more I study History, the less convinced I am "progress" is a real thing. We keep unfolding all these technical achievements yet struggle with the very same issues as 2, 3, 4 thousand years ago.

We are very much the same animals, biologically speaking, as we were then. With the same built in proficiencies and deficiencies.

To me that's one of the great values of these old philosophical/psychological texts. They can reveal what is essential and what is accidental in us.

For all the convolution Nassin Taleb has published (you really have to put what he publishes in the perspective of a guy who thought up a bet against the grain of the conventional thinking in financial markets, won big and got to live off that and just publish opinion pieces forevermore), I think he hit the nail on the head with the idea that very old books still in print are worth reading. The older the better, precisely because of what you said. I got more insight from reading Gilgamesh than from whole semesters of my college years.

My sense is that this is a personality/neurological difference. Some people are more prone to metacognitive modes of thought. I'm not sure on the whole it's an advantage. It allows you to see stuff like this, but I think it can also make people prone to indecision, depression, etc.

You bring up really good points.

I do think that there are always going to be people that fall in line with that they are told while a select few "decision makers" call most of the shots. The takeaway from your comment is that we need decision makers that are going to lead things to be more healthy instead just benefitting one side.

> When I have talked to people about advertising in general, I've found that they just don't care.

Perhaps rephrasing "do you care about watching ads" to "do you care how much time you spend on social media". I am sure people see little value in visual pollution, specially when you can tune most of it out using ad blockers. I am less sure people don't care about having more time to do things that make them actually happy.

It’s the age old parental problem. Get outside and go and experience life instead of watching it on a screen.

Opportunity costs.

We fundamentally don’t understand that life is finite and those times change into something 100% different with different pressures.

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