Read the linked article.
Click bait title 
I thought it’s a machine learning article
What about the title implied that?
“Attention is all you need” is a famous ML paper. Though given the content of the article I don’t think the author was intentionally referencing that.
That is exactly what the article is about.
We could call doing such a thing, referencing a seminal work with a similar title that’s so close that you couldn’t to it that have missed it, yet somehow you did, as an AliceGG’s Mistake.
How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?
On the other hand, the article was exactly what I expected from the title.
clearly
“There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts.”
Yes. And–change your thoughts, change your life: https://thinkhuman.com/change-your-thoughts-change-your-life…
This is why I like books. No attempt at attention hijacking. Wheras every other modern app tries to claw your eyes out.
You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they may not be as addictive as “the algorithm” of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021108094511/http://www.msn.co…
My MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021107081016/http://my.msn.com…
Given the tone of the blog otherwise, I think it was intended to both grab attention and subtly imply that AI is irrelevant with feigned ignorance.
I think this needs a strategic change. Unless you have a clear cut life objective and you are really into it, everything else you try to improve are at most tactical wins that will be lost to time. And those small wins actually make the end frustration worse because you thought you won strategically this time.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.
[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio…
Our book club has actually noted that more and more mainstream books are written for low attention span. Repeating details ad nauseum and simplifying the plot significantly. So I don’t think books are immune to this automatically.
I think in the next five years the internet will change drastically. Walled gardens, invite only, and companies that verify you’re a human (I.E. use government identification).
There is now no way to tell if somebody online in a human or a robot. Even video/zoom/voice is no longer a distinguishable.
Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
This is just the illusion of choice. Not only that attention was already being monetized. Digital advertising didn’t start with algorithmic feeds.
Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us.
100% agree, and this is exactly why I disable any sort of algorithmic recommendations on the platforms I’m active on. I do this either through the app itself or by using those platforms on the web and hiding distracting elements with an extension like uBlock or AdGuard.
My final feed consists only of channels/profiles I directly follow. Oh, and there’s also RSS…
I really recommend everyone do the same. It really clears your head.
I cut out Social Media earlier this year, and it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made. Part of why I started was remembering that we didn’t have doom-scrolling apps before smartphones. The change has been tremendous since I’ve been trying to go back to more “intentional” media. When I find myself distracted and wanting to pick up my phone, I realize there isn’t really anything on it for me to do and am forced to just put it away. So I’ve started getting into the habit of keeping a book on me wherever I go. I’ve read 4 books this year!
We don’t have protection from attention hijacking algorithms the same way workers didn’t have protection until unions became a thing. AI can do more for consumers than Unions ever could (because it’ll be more uniform). Currently there’s no motivation (monetary or otherwise) to make this tech easily available to the masses - and when it does the bad actors and dark pattern wizards will miss the good ole days when only the select few had access to these patterns.