2026-01-21
just a ride
Patrick Jordan Anderson has an interesting argument that attention is not a resource, and treating it in that manner is at odds with its true purpose, ultimately devaluing it. Though insofar as the market doesn’t block attention’s historical usages, it’s not clear to me that this is really the case. It’s true that like its informational counterpart, attention derives value not from itself but rather from the potential change in the world arising from their specific combination. The issue with this analysis is that it ignores why the markets for attention have been created in the first place, which is because democratic politics stipulates that all people are equal under one person one vote. The US GDP per capita establishes a baseline value on attention, a sufficiently high value that the variance can be ignored, thereby unlocking commodity-style treatment1.
Ivan Vendrov has a long interview with Robin Hanson which is probably the most comprehensive overview of Robin’s current thoughts on cultural drift. It seems to me Robin is taking an almost perverse delight in presenting how all of his solutions would never be accepted by society, as an example of how broken our culture has become. But it feels like most of these “solutions” would also have been seen as unacceptable historically by every culture which has ever existed. Anyway, it seems to me that Robin is overindexing on the importance of persuasion, perhaps because of his cultural background of academia (as opposed to Silicon Valley) and underrating the power of the fait accompli. If everyone has to change their behavior in order to prevent decline, that seems to me much less likely to succeed than preparing a small cultural-technological package which could be readily adopted after events validate your predictions2.
Phoebe Arslanagić-Little in Works in Progress about the Aerated Bread Company (via Stefan Schubert)
Bryan Caplan travel vignettes for his recent Latin American trip with his sons to Peru and Bolivia.
Aelle with a collection of highbrow memes.
This is not a perfect picture, because for example, votes in Pennsylvania are more valuable than those from California. Likewise, people in other countries (even those not in democratic countries) also find their attention commoditized, despite their significantly lower claim to global economic value. On that note, Rohit Krishnan and Alex Imas perform some initial modelling on Seb Krier’s vision of Cosean bargaining at scale via personal AI agents. One reason that attention has commodified is that the value of matching between particular pieces of information and the attention of specific individuals is not “easy to describe”, and therefore too computationally expensive to perform at scale. I suspect that if AI agents start managing our attention for us, then we’ll quickly see significant price discrimination in attention markets, such that many people even find themselves in the unenviable situation of having to pay to access slop which is currently trending.
As an example, if I were Robin, I would be trying to figure out how to evade the 14-day limit on embryo research to start building and testing functional artificial wombs. Because assuming that low fertility causes “innovation to grind to a halt”, then once fertility actually reaches the point of no return, then this technology will have become permanently out of reach. But if prepared ahead of time, then if and when people realize that the end is coming, then presumably there will be at least a few slightly more prescient countries who would be willing to put them to use at scale in time to save themselves.