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Comment by cen4 | Hacker News Reader

Think more about Attention. Not about Information.

Information is exploding and global available Attention doesn't grow. People who pay attention to one thing, can't use the same time to pay attention to something else.

So govts and corps fight over this common pool of Attention using the Media (TV/Movies/Radio/Social/News/Sports/Gaming etc etc), just like they fought over land and oil and other natural resources. Media is literally used like front line troops of colonial empires in Attention capture wars.

But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose. We await someone or some group to articulate that vision. Until then people working in Attention Capture fields will keep amusing us to death.

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But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose.

The problem is that "people working in Attention Capture fields" are the exact people who are winning, at least by the most common scoring mechanism of 'wealth'.

They're enriching their bank accounts just as they're impoverishing their spirits. On their deathbeds, no one ever says "gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office." The same could be said for any other wealth-motivated exercise.

If I have learned one thing in life it is this: money is, at best, a necessary evil. A means to an end. Pursuing it as an end in itself is an indication that we have strayed from the path and forgotten what we were doing.

Money has made it far easier to barter work into what people need to survive, obtain stability & enjoy life, than its absence.

It’s easy to be jaded by those that obviously value it more than others’ well being.

But the mismatch of priorities is what is wrong, that doesn’t negate money’s positive practical value & impact.

Most people have a more multifaceted relationship with money than as a dehumanizing god or drug.

Sure, but they’re also outbidding me for a house.

Are you trying to get in a "good school district" ? Is that really that strongly correlated to kids outcome in life .

kids grow up and fight for a house in good school district :).

I feel like having kids is root of all evil. Ppl justify all sorts of things (like wars and bidding for houses) and say that they are doing those things for sake of their kids.

>…having kids is the root of all evil.

Quite a take there. Kids are also the source of all joy and happiness, depending on how you look at it.

Yea I agree. I have kids too :)

But they are also the source of global warming, wars. On a personal level they a source of anxiety, continuous striving, jealousy and fear.

No, but I want to live somewhere my kids have the freedom to bike and walk around town safely.

Anyway, I just took a job helping get more houses off gas and on heat pumps, which is aligned with my goal to be part of addressing climate change, but it is hard to get a house near work (in Amsterdam in this case) when not optimising for pay.

> No, but I want to live somewhere my kids have the freedom to bike and walk around town safely.

Hmmmz, kids can do that practically anywhere in NL (and have good schools). Except maybe in parts of the big cities.

Countryside is both cheaper, safer, and the air is healthier. But don't go too rural. Because then wolves will get your kids for breakfast.

The problem with too rural is the people, not the wolves. You’re right though, and it’s why we moved to NL.

I was mostly thinking of back when I was in California to be honest. Though recently when I had to decide between a four or five day work week the biggest factor was “will I be able to outbid other people who want the same house”

As far as schools, I’ve been underwhelmed. They have kids on tablets a lot, shove a tv in front of them for lunch, and have rapidly declining PISA scores.

On their deathbeds, no one ever says "gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office."

I bet a lot of people have died regretting they didn't earn more.

I swear I am going to, on my deathbed, say "gee, I wish I'd spent more time at the office," just to stop this quote going around. In the last five years I've had a few conversations about regret with elderly relatives who have now passed away. None of them regretted going to work. My grandparents met at work. One regretted that she'd been a draftswoman rather than an engineer, but that's almost the exact opposite. I don't understand why people think doing good work that inspires pride and then getting paid for it is going to be some kind of horrible deathbed regret. It has literally never been a deathbed regret for anyone whose deathbed I have attended.

They should have said: "gee, I wish I spent more time influencing people into buying things they do not need".

> I don't understand why people think doing good work that inspires pride and then getting paid for it is going to be some kind of horrible deathbed regret.

Because there is nothing in the definition you give that remotely looks like the median job. Societies are not structured to maximize the number of jobs that fits this definition. If social structure happens to fit your Ikigai, congratulation you won the cosmic loto, enjoy.

But maybe it’s not a relevant point to show surprise on this point. Consider how much people in the rest of humanity will have to go through major existential stressful abhorrent challenges, geopolitical struggles, being effectively reduced to dull task slaves by whoever happen to be their lord of the day. How then to be surprised that at the end of their life they can think "work moments were so shitty, I wish I had spend more enjoyable ones like those I experienced while taking time with people I deeply sincerely love".

By the way, if you haven’t yet do that today, tell at least to at least three people around you how much you love them and care that they enjoy moment passed together. I promise you won’t regret it on your death bed. ;)

I'm talking about a wide range of jobs -- draftswoman, ship's engineer and structural engineer, typist, teacher -- held by people who grew up during the major existential struggles that were the great depression and the second world war. Working as a typist in the 1940s and 1950s was not some kind of utopian magical job full of meaning, but my grandmother could still hit a higher WPM than I can and she was proud of what she'd done. Earning an income was a means of doing things that she would never have been able to do otherwise. She felt lucky to be able to do things like take a ship to Europe without a chaperone and using money she'd earned, given that her mother's generation of women would have found it much harder.

My experience has been that older people often have a different outlook on life than what people my age, including me, would predict. Part of that is experience, part is coming from a different time where the baseline for quality of life was lower, and I suspect part of it is rose-tinted glasses.

Yeah but there's negative attention, too.

Negative attention will eventually have consequences. Either they grow deaf, run away, become enraged, etc.

I think of the millions of ads, singers, bullies, salesmen who've vied for my attention, and you wear down. You get sick of saying "no", pretending not to notice, brushing aside dialogs, feeling bad because you can't help.

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Laurie-Anderson/Language-I...

I don't know, it's possible for a person to pay no attention to anything. Therefore it isn't always maxed out. Also the "quality" of attention can vary. I think the time spent looking at things has increased, but the level of focus and "deep attention" paid to things has likely fallen over time.

> But no one wins as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose. We await someone or some group to articulate that vision.

One of the best things I've done for myself is to stop reading the news. You will not believe how this ignorance has led me to a calmer life, to the gasp and concern of my peers, wondering how am I able to cope, to exist, without knowing what happens "in the world?"

As you say, anyone has 1 unit of attention, and unlike many other things, it is fully in our control. The biggest lie modern generations have been told is that the more knowledge about things, the greater the happiness. That you need to know what happens half a world away from you, often in more detail than what happens at your doorstep.

What saddens me the most about the future generations is seeing how politicised they has become, politics the game of rich old people; the powers that be have figured out that if they turn what happens in the palace into entertainment, people are distracted and don't get into them silly ideas like trying to change things. These days politics is slapstick comedy for "grown ups", and it's sad to see it infect the younger generations now.

You might enjoy this piece by Charles Simic, which is a touchstone of mine:

"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."

https://archive.is/0GZmW

(I haven't managed to stop reading the news unfortunately...)

Thank you for that. I really enjoyed it. It resonates with me. I have lived in three different countries, and in my two non-native countries, I have enjoyed my life much more. I think part of it is that there I have been somewhat oblivious to the news and current politics of the new places I have lived. I get some of news and politics from my friends, but I do not follow it like I used to in my country of origin. I have also dramatically reduced my news consumption in my native country, because I am not there very often, and it does not preoccupy me so much anymore. Though I have not given up the news entirely, either in my home country or in my adopted countries, but less is, I feel, much better.

I understand, fully and deeply, why news and current events are important, but they are also a cancer. At least in the way that they are sold to us. I also get a sense that the negative effect that the news has our mental health is quite widespread around the world. As in, it is not unique to America or Britain or European countries, etc.

It's my opinion that "thinking locally and acting locally" is a strategy better reserved for old age.

You have it the wrong way round: when you're young, you (want to) believe your actions have world-changing impact and reach. Then you grow up, and see that the world is much bigger than you, bigger than your ego even, and cannot be wielded or moulded by anyone; so you learn to focus on what's around you and who's around you.

I actually do agree with you. If you "think locally and act locally" while young, you run the risk of being blindsided by tail outcomes in the future.

I think either global thinking or acting in youth is a prerequisite to arriving at the position you describe. I mean, is there a better explanation for mid-life crises?

Arguably religion used to provide that purpose but most of the Western world has walked away from it without choosing something to replace that sense of purpose. If, as Marx asserted, that religion was the opiate of the masses then the current "attention economy" is the methamphetamine of the masses.

What I have noticed about religion is that today's view of it is distorted. I see it as closer to psychology/sociology/civics. The description I see used today about ancient ideas of social cohesion is narrow minded with a hint of superiority.

Yes, historically religion provided not only a means of understanding one's place in the social system in which one lived but also provided a sense of self in a much longer historical aspect. Successful religions existed on the order of centuries, if not millennia, and set the foundation for one's understanding of self, membership within the group, morality and ethics, legal frameworks, and an explanatory model for the universe in which all these operated.. all of which had outlasted rulers, systems of government, nations, etc.

There is a war going on for your mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ne0DmiuHeg

> as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose

We tried out the grand visions to improve the human condition with one great push in the 20th century- didn’t work out so well

The failure of some grand visions doesn’t doom all future ones. That’s just silly.

Everyone knows that if at first you don’t succeed, never try again.

Grand vision (or ideology as it’s also called) is a dead end of history - has been tried too many times, always failed spectacularly.

Instead we need small incremental lasting change - thinking we can transform life within a generation without repercussions, that’s just silly

We actively live under an ideology, and the idea that we should only seek to change things in small incremental ways is a fixture of that ideology. I think that’s called liberalism but I’m not really sure. Either way, who said anything about grand visions being restricted to a short time window of implementation? Any grand vision I could remotely conceive of would have to take centuries at least, unless maybe you consider some benevolent AI dictator or something.

Grand visions are more in service of megalomaniacal egos than actual solutions. They all just paint over the very real complexities of the world and expect things to just work as they envisioned. Just get rid of the sparrows eating grains and it will just be fine! There are limits to what complexities can be contained within one human mind, and with a world already orders of magnitudes more complex than that we need the humility to admit that the vision of one human mind is not and cannot be all-encompassing. I think it is fair to say that the usefulness of grand visions is dead.

There’s no requirement that a vision be constrained within one person’s mind, that it be inflexible to changing conditions, that it be incapable of testing policies before it implements them, and who’s to say that sufficiently complex machines or new organizations of people wouldn’t be capable of successfully abstracting society’s irreducible complexities well enough to make good decisions? Couldn’t a grand vision, for example, be one in which local communities make most important decisions for themselves, thus removing most of the computational failures of central governance? I just think you’re picturing fascism or communism when I say grand vision, but imo those aren’t representative of what every grand vision would look like.

The Green Revolution, vaccines, and space exploration have been pretty great.

Literacy too!

It's not all about attention.

Most companies are still in it for the money, and attention is only a means to an end.

For the idiotic narcissist leaders that pop up every now and then, attention might be interesting by itself. But luckily for us, there's just very few of those. Most of our government bodies are comprised of people who actually mean to do good, and just a bit of attention to some important matters suffices.

i would add laziness too.

attention usually takes the path of least effort.

Change attention to intention

Attention is all you need?

This is a very deep thought that has crossed my mind quite a lot as I’ve used LLMs and other AI.

Ironically, we are discovering the human condition by evaluating what we are “not”.

… but, we are.

Attention is how we see ourselves reflected in others.

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