provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
Are Attention Spans Actually Shrinking? (Pt 1)
open.substack.com
Once I started to think in terms of TTI, it upended the entire concept of attention for me and forced me to acknowledge that maybe people’s attention spans weren’t getting shorter after all.
Framed through the lens of TTI, audiences don’t suffer from a dilemma of shortened attention spans, but rather a dilemma of increased choice (see the abundance crisis above).
All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working
... See moreFreddie deBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now. - Freddie deBoer You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.
it’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically as you bludgeon it into existence. It’s hard to raise the money and to find the right people. So if you’re going to dedicate your life to a business, which is the only way it will ever work, you should choose one... See more
What It Takes Quotes by Stephen A. Schwarzman
Both True: “The customer is always right” and “The audience doesn’t know what they want”
If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.
a glorious rewrite of the giving tree. much rather model society on this.
As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,
I could do better than that.
I could do better than that.
Paul Graham • Taste for Makers
Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop.
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