Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#11
post #3

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” -- Carl Sagan

Agree, also at this point I feel like there are more books/posts/content than useful combinations of words :/

The exception to this is journalism, and maybe the problem is that information/knowledge sharing has been massively approach as if it were journalism.

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#12

Yeah because creating new valuable information takes attention, and we are having attention sapped from most due to the addictive smartphones and technologies that are always with us and super performant. I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment.

Agree! Also even if valuable information were created more frequently eventually we're just repeating ourselves. It'd be ideal an index of canonical info/knowledge for example.

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#13
Doug Engelbart in the 1960s would’ve expected that we, in 2022, would have computers that will just immediately present us with the exact answer that we are looking for. That will do all of the searching and filtering and refining for us. That will ask us to clarify our question if it is ambiguous. And that will immediately tell us if the question we have asked is one to which humanity has yet to find an answer. The computer would help us be more efficient with our tiny brains. To allow us to focus on processing what is worth processing. And that we can focus our explorations on the areas that haven’t been explored.

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#14

Yeah because creating new valuable information takes attention, and we are having attention sapped from most due to the addictive smartphones and technologies that are always with us and super performant. I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment.

How does a 120hz screen allow you to read faster?

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#15

Yes, just as reasons made an orgy of the age of reason. Novelty and mass apatite are only eclipsed by the panicked reflex for survival. Curation is the new art. Find outlets which themselves refine and distill, without disappointing.

I see, one of the challenges I find there is that outlets overlap intentionally and partially and there's no incentive to only refer information to its canonical source. Maybe it's just FOMO on information .

That is the chaotic aspect of Objective Reality.

State is one thing, representing that state is another (we now hesitate to use the word “meta”).

Disposition toward that state is both a strategic imperative and the source of inferential bias.

What you seek are Authorities of Truth.

Like Wiki on blockchain consensus which both empirically records events in time series and mob debates their validity or relevance.

Human cognition is not as clean and clear regarding “facts” as you optimistically presume.

Information is the removal of uncertainty (or the resolve of potential to disparate state if you accuse me of anthropomorphism.)

If it does not “remove uncertainty” it is not information.

Information is not objective, it’s value lies in the mind of the evaluator.

The Truth is a perturbation of Objective Reality. The “truth” is the representation in mind. “Integrity” is the measure of consistency between these two.

And one more thing. The “democratic” mob is NOT a qualified curator of truths, only a barometer of widely disseminated integrity (which usually comes by undeceiving the self rather than agreeing with one and other.)

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, one of the challenges I find there is that outlets overlap intentionally and partially and there's no incentive to only refer information to its canonical source. Maybe it's just FOMO on information .

That is the chaotic aspect of Objective Reality. State is one thing, representing that state is another (we now hesitate to use the word “meta”). Disposition toward that state is both a strategic imperative and the source of inferential bias. What you seek are Authorities of Truth. Like Wiki on blockchain consensus which both empirically records events in time series and mob debates their validity or relevance. Human…

Do you mind sharing references to read more about the approach in which you are framing the problem?

Also maybe if we limit the aspiration indexing statements whose veracity can change over time and be accepted by experts then we would only refer to that canonical reference instead of remaking the statement or questioning its veracity, might work (?)

I see this today in the exercise of making sure what you want to communicate (statements) has not been communicated before, but this exercise is not suitable if platforms reward repackaging information as content so there can be influencers/people profiting out of it.

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the chaotic aspect of Objective Reality. State is one thing, representing that state is another (we now hesitate to use the word “meta”). Disposition toward that state is both a strategic imperative and the source of inferential bias. What you seek are Authorities of Truth. Like Wiki on blockchain consensus which both empirically records events in time series and mob debates their validity or relevance. Human…

Do you mind sharing references to read more about the approach in which you are framing the problem? Also maybe if we limit the aspiration indexing statements whose veracity can change over time and be accepted by experts then we would only refer to that canonical reference instead of remaking the statement or questioning its veracity, might work (?) I see this today in the exercise of making sure what you want to co…

I think you’re going in the wrong direction.

We suffer from a mass delusion that once something is said and accepted, it represents the precipice of understanding.

It does not.

We must remake ourselves every generation. We must replicate, disseminate, corroborate. And reprocess.

This information processing is distributed, asynchronous, and working at a glacial pace in our minds.

Our human understanding is not what can be googled or found in a book, it is our working knowledge. For working knowledge, knowing must be worked. This produces endless distillations and specializations. There will be content creators for as long as there will be content consumers.

The popular ones will skew for modern relevance. The “good” ones will preserve faithfulness to barely knowable truths.

Cognitively it actually takes three years of familiarity before a mind has integrated an idea. And ten years to see the full consequences of that ideas integration.

We aren’t as individually competent and knowledgeable as we imagine. We need the churn, merely of highest available quality.

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#18
post #3

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” -- Carl Sagan

Agree, also at this point I feel like there are more books/posts/content than useful combinations of words :/ The exception to this is journalism, and maybe the problem is that information/knowledge sharing has been massively approach as if it were journalism.

I agree that we need Journalism as in reporting on current events, as it appears that we are drowning opinion-editorial content

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#19
post #14

Yeah because creating new valuable information takes attention, and we are having attention sapped from most due to the addictive smartphones and technologies that are always with us and super performant. I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment.

How does a 120hz screen allow you to read faster?

You can blink faster

Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information

#20
Not at all. We now have access to a waste universe of information. The trick is to filter out the noise. For example, I am watching talks on YouTube by world class experts in metabolism from the comfort of my own home. Without the internet, I would have to fly to another country to watch talks at that level of quality. However there are also a waste number of pseudo-science videos on YouTube. So you have to carefully filter out the signal from the noise. It’s a bit annoying but absolutely worth it.
Post reply on HN