5 ms·

I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of beh

I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department): """ In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.) """

reubenswartz 4y ago
One of my favorite (perhaps that's the wrong word?) quotes, that explains so much.
Balgair 4y ago
A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem. I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one. The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest. Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while. If you'd like to read along too, you can download scanned versions of the books here: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 . For example, today's reading is: Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered. As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
- HarvardClassics 4y ago
  You know what? Screw it, I'm starting a bookclub on the readings for the Harvard Classics. Here's the discussion for today's reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31741839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31741839 I'll try my level best to post the daily reading every day for the next year. Let's use those posts as a place to discuss the readings. Join me on this 15-minute-a-day quest to bettering ourselves.
walrus01 4y ago
> a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. one could also say that when there's a scarcity of newsworthy events, or things to cover that might sell advertising to certain demographics, you get entirely new media things (like TMZ) which are the trashy digital version of the UK tabloid press. if such media organizations within that category think there is a scarcity of attention, they'll fabricate something new and shocking and hype it endlessly until it becomes a top item. media entities creating entire media properties/brands for the purpose of reporting about the goings-on of other media entities/celebrities/brands. it's like an ouroboros of media made from kardashians, hype, fear, angst, anger (hello rupert murdoch). now combine the above with what I would charitably describe as weaponized advertising technology, building profiles on individual facebook/twitter/instagram/tiktok/whatever social media users and their extended friends network.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  I wouldn’t say there is a scarcity of newsworthy events. You could spend all your waking hours just reading about important things happening in the world and still not run out. However, reading newsworthy events takes a lot of brain energy, and you can’t sustain that all day. That means if you want people to spend a lot of time consuming your content, it has to be easy to consume content.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    I totally agree there really isn't a scarcity of newsworthy events worldwide for the persons who care to read sober, rational news media reporting on various things (economy, politics, wars, transportation, international aid/development, etc). I'm talking about things written by people who have actual degrees in journalism, politics, economics from well respected universities whose names are recognized internationally. Journalism that wins Pulitzer prizes. Then we have a whole other category of "news" which has been fabricated out of whole cloth for the purpose of selling even more advertising to a vast demographic of people who are never, or very rarely going to sit down to read the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times or similar on a daily basis. I have a theory that the aggregate advertising revenue from the latter class of "news" is rapidly eclipsing the first type.
AlexanderTheGr8 4y ago
If he actually said this in 1971, hats off to him. That's an amazing prediction. Internet and the personal computer (information-rich) became popular after 1970s, so predicting attention scarcity before that is very prescient. The cynic in me says that hundreds of people guessed about computer's future in 1970s that some of them are bound to be right. But Simon's prediction seems genuinely amazing.
- itisit 4y ago
  It’s not prescient when one is recognizing an issue already present.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Even without computers there was an overwhelming amount of information available in 1970. (well, computers for access, I guess they had some impact on publishing and such by then)
- bombcar 4y ago
  There were people in the 1800s complaining that newspapers sucked too much time and weren't useful.
  - neuronic 4y ago
    Let me drift off a bit. I want to mention that not 100% of our time needs to be spent on something "useful". While it's something everyone needs to define for themselves, recovery and enjoying life outside of what is deemed "productive" is also very much important. I am writing this because I have personally been affected (as bystander) if people don't take this seriously. For Germany, I can say that in recent years, health insurances are reporting a very significant increase in burn-out cases which easily take months of recovery and are a very significant problem in the economy with high financial impact on both society and individual lives. Maybe it has to do with the type of work we do nowadays, or it has simply become more acceptable to openly tackle this issue instead of hiding or dismissing it. I don't know. But I have personally witnessed several people (!) go through this and it's terrible. Hiding it doesn't mean it isn't there and ruining lives behind the scenes. The 1800s was a different situation altogether and time-wise probably one of the worst periods to be alive as working class. 10-16 hour workdays, repetitive and physically demanding work, no rights and barely any medical attention. I am very certain that people didn't just "toughen" that out, it had to come at a very high cost.
corrral 4y ago
This is why, in practice, you'd still probably come out way better, intellectually and perhaps in terms of happiness, spending a few years with a well-curated bookcase—or even just a library card—and some notebooks, rather than unfettered access to the Web, despite what a lot of us thought about it'd bring to the world, years ago. A good bookcase still wins. Turns out I don't have time for "everything" anyway (and it's not really got everything, anyway, though The Web is very good at delivering 'everything' when it comes to cheap trivia)
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  One of my startup ideas is to create this "bookcase" for the web. A curated list of really solid "books" and other information sources. My kids are constantly bringing home all kinds of interesting things from the library, and I remember how much cool stuff there is on the shelves from my youth. That stuff is just missing from the web. I'm surprised traditional publishers, the folks that actually print books, don't start working back through their catalogs building some kind of online library. I suspect that its because of the way contracts are written that don't leave anybody owning the complete book. I suspect you would have to go back to authors, photographers, and illustrators and renegotiate use of assets again.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Online libraries exist and offer a lot of this. Here is a good example of some curated lists of books for teens from a library: https://lapl.org/teens/books https://lapl.org/teens/books
- aaronwalker 4y ago
  The idea of a well curated bookcase beating access to the World Wide Web is not one I’m so sure about. Permissionless access to a massive consortium of information, even if most of it is low quality, has empowered communities to learn concepts that they normally would not be able to (Khan Academy, Wikipedia, YouTube). Id agree that sitting with a bookcase for a long time would lend itself well to analysis because there is such limited information, whereas the way most people use the internet is by consuming in abundance. But the ease of use and accessibility of the web beats books.
naveen99 4y ago
Well if attention is all you need, we have bert now. so we will be able to sort through more information now. But the arms race between spam and attention is definitely going to language wars 2.
cageface 4y ago
Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" discusses this tension in detail. It was written in 1985 as an analysis of the effect of television on our attention span but his conclusions are even more applicable to digital media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
- whycombinater 4y ago
  Star Trek: TNG episode "The Game" anyone?
- Syonyk 4y ago
  That was a depressing read, knowing where things went afterwards. //EDIT: Decent Roger Waters album, though. I should hunt it down on vinyl. "The Shallows" by Carr - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) - was even worse. Published in 2010, based on research dating up to about 2008, it said, "Huh. Reading stuff on a screen is weird. We need to be really, really careful about what we do with that going forward." And it was entirely ignored as we launched into the smartphone, attention-vampire model of personal electronics.
  - thundergolfer 4y ago
    Ezra Klein Show has a good episode with the author of The Shallows[1]. 1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-reading-and-digital-thinking/id1081584611?i=1000480085743 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-...
  - daseiner1 4y ago
    Do you happen to know if there’s been any research into whether e-ink (thinking of my Kindle here) is any better than reading off of a traditional screen?
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      I'm not sure. I've moved most of my reading and reference material to e-ink (Kobo, I avoid Amazon in every way possible and de-DRM anything I can only find on them), and I think it's better than a LCD from a distraction perspective, but it lacks some of the "concrete physical location cues" of a real book. The Shallows talked about how hyperlinks and such were a major distraction point in reading web articles, so I'd imagine e-ink is better for book form, but... no, I don't know for sure. Sorry. I will say that people look at me funny when I tell them, after sending me an hour YouTube video on some topic, that I'd rather they send me the titles of three comprehensive books on it. If it's interesting to me, I'll read the books, and have a far better grasp on the topic than someone's biased, attention-focused video, though.
Biologist123 4y ago
Wow this was prophetic.
bmitc 4y ago
Herbert Simon was of unbelievable intelligence. Everything I have read from him has been directly on point but yet literally decades ahead of its time.
anon2020dot00 4y ago
Great quote and it speaks to how we need to curate on where we spend our attention on since there is an over-abundance of information in the internet.
a_square_peg 4y ago
That's a fantastic quote - thanks for sharing!
saint_abroad 4y ago
I'd corrupt the quote slightly to factor informational effects of propaganda: "a wealth of [conflicting] information creates [an apathy] of attention and a need to [withdraw] that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." In this way, information sources can destroy attention rather than foster efficient allocation (which is hard work).

reubenswartz 4y ago

One of my favorite (perhaps that's the wrong word?) quotes, that explains so much.

Balgair 4y ago

A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem. I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one. The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest. Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while. If you'd like to read along too, you can download scanned versions of the books here: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 . For example, today's reading is: Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered. As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

HarvardClassics 4y ago
You know what? Screw it, I'm starting a bookclub on the readings for the Harvard Classics. Here's the discussion for today's reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31741839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31741839 I'll try my level best to post the daily reading every day for the next year. Let's use those posts as a place to discuss the readings. Join me on this 15-minute-a-day quest to bettering ourselves.

walrus01 4y ago

> a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. one could also say that when there's a scarcity of newsworthy events, or things to cover that might sell advertising to certain demographics, you get entirely new media things (like TMZ) which are the trashy digital version of the UK tabloid press. if such media organizations within that category think there is a scarcity of attention, they'll fabricate something new and shocking and hype it endlessly until it becomes a top item. media entities creating entire media properties/brands for the purpose of reporting about the goings-on of other media entities/celebrities/brands. it's like an ouroboros of media made from kardashians, hype, fear, angst, anger (hello rupert murdoch). now combine the above with what I would charitably describe as weaponized advertising technology, building profiles on individual facebook/twitter/instagram/tiktok/whatever social media users and their extended friends network.

cortesoft 4y ago
I wouldn’t say there is a scarcity of newsworthy events. You could spend all your waking hours just reading about important things happening in the world and still not run out. However, reading newsworthy events takes a lot of brain energy, and you can’t sustain that all day. That means if you want people to spend a lot of time consuming your content, it has to be easy to consume content.
- walrus01 4y ago
  I totally agree there really isn't a scarcity of newsworthy events worldwide for the persons who care to read sober, rational news media reporting on various things (economy, politics, wars, transportation, international aid/development, etc). I'm talking about things written by people who have actual degrees in journalism, politics, economics from well respected universities whose names are recognized internationally. Journalism that wins Pulitzer prizes. Then we have a whole other category of "news" which has been fabricated out of whole cloth for the purpose of selling even more advertising to a vast demographic of people who are never, or very rarely going to sit down to read the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times or similar on a daily basis. I have a theory that the aggregate advertising revenue from the latter class of "news" is rapidly eclipsing the first type.

AlexanderTheGr8 4y ago

If he actually said this in 1971, hats off to him. That's an amazing prediction. Internet and the personal computer (information-rich) became popular after 1970s, so predicting attention scarcity before that is very prescient. The cynic in me says that hundreds of people guessed about computer's future in 1970s that some of them are bound to be right. But Simon's prediction seems genuinely amazing.

itisit 4y ago
It’s not prescient when one is recognizing an issue already present.
maxerickson 4y ago
Even without computers there was an overwhelming amount of information available in 1970. (well, computers for access, I guess they had some impact on publishing and such by then)
bombcar 4y ago
There were people in the 1800s complaining that newspapers sucked too much time and weren't useful.
- neuronic 4y ago
  Let me drift off a bit. I want to mention that not 100% of our time needs to be spent on something "useful". While it's something everyone needs to define for themselves, recovery and enjoying life outside of what is deemed "productive" is also very much important. I am writing this because I have personally been affected (as bystander) if people don't take this seriously. For Germany, I can say that in recent years, health insurances are reporting a very significant increase in burn-out cases which easily take months of recovery and are a very significant problem in the economy with high financial impact on both society and individual lives. Maybe it has to do with the type of work we do nowadays, or it has simply become more acceptable to openly tackle this issue instead of hiding or dismissing it. I don't know. But I have personally witnessed several people (!) go through this and it's terrible. Hiding it doesn't mean it isn't there and ruining lives behind the scenes. The 1800s was a different situation altogether and time-wise probably one of the worst periods to be alive as working class. 10-16 hour workdays, repetitive and physically demanding work, no rights and barely any medical attention. I am very certain that people didn't just "toughen" that out, it had to come at a very high cost.

corrral 4y ago

This is why, in practice, you'd still probably come out way better, intellectually and perhaps in terms of happiness, spending a few years with a well-curated bookcase—or even just a library card—and some notebooks, rather than unfettered access to the Web, despite what a lot of us thought about it'd bring to the world, years ago. A good bookcase still wins. Turns out I don't have time for "everything" anyway (and it's not really got everything, anyway, though The Web is very good at delivering 'everything' when it comes to cheap trivia)

jay_kyburz 4y ago
One of my startup ideas is to create this "bookcase" for the web. A curated list of really solid "books" and other information sources. My kids are constantly bringing home all kinds of interesting things from the library, and I remember how much cool stuff there is on the shelves from my youth. That stuff is just missing from the web. I'm surprised traditional publishers, the folks that actually print books, don't start working back through their catalogs building some kind of online library. I suspect that its because of the way contracts are written that don't leave anybody owning the complete book. I suspect you would have to go back to authors, photographers, and illustrators and renegotiate use of assets again.
- asdff 4y ago
  Online libraries exist and offer a lot of this. Here is a good example of some curated lists of books for teens from a library: https://lapl.org/teens/books https://lapl.org/teens/books
aaronwalker 4y ago
The idea of a well curated bookcase beating access to the World Wide Web is not one I’m so sure about. Permissionless access to a massive consortium of information, even if most of it is low quality, has empowered communities to learn concepts that they normally would not be able to (Khan Academy, Wikipedia, YouTube). Id agree that sitting with a bookcase for a long time would lend itself well to analysis because there is such limited information, whereas the way most people use the internet is by consuming in abundance. But the ease of use and accessibility of the web beats books.

naveen99 4y ago

Well if attention is all you need, we have bert now. so we will be able to sort through more information now. But the arms race between spam and attention is definitely going to language wars 2.

cageface 4y ago

Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" discusses this tension in detail. It was written in 1985 as an analysis of the effect of television on our attention span but his conclusions are even more applicable to digital media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

whycombinater 4y ago
Star Trek: TNG episode "The Game" anyone?
Syonyk 4y ago
That was a depressing read, knowing where things went afterwards. //EDIT: Decent Roger Waters album, though. I should hunt it down on vinyl. "The Shallows" by Carr - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) - was even worse. Published in 2010, based on research dating up to about 2008, it said, "Huh. Reading stuff on a screen is weird. We need to be really, really careful about what we do with that going forward." And it was entirely ignored as we launched into the smartphone, attention-vampire model of personal electronics.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Ezra Klein Show has a good episode with the author of The Shallows[1]. 1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-reading-and-digital-thinking/id1081584611?i=1000480085743 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicholas-carr-on-deep-...
- daseiner1 4y ago
  Do you happen to know if there’s been any research into whether e-ink (thinking of my Kindle here) is any better than reading off of a traditional screen?
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    I'm not sure. I've moved most of my reading and reference material to e-ink (Kobo, I avoid Amazon in every way possible and de-DRM anything I can only find on them), and I think it's better than a LCD from a distraction perspective, but it lacks some of the "concrete physical location cues" of a real book. The Shallows talked about how hyperlinks and such were a major distraction point in reading web articles, so I'd imagine e-ink is better for book form, but... no, I don't know for sure. Sorry. I will say that people look at me funny when I tell them, after sending me an hour YouTube video on some topic, that I'd rather they send me the titles of three comprehensive books on it. If it's interesting to me, I'll read the books, and have a far better grasp on the topic than someone's biased, attention-focused video, though.

Biologist123 4y ago

Wow this was prophetic.

bmitc 4y ago

Herbert Simon was of unbelievable intelligence. Everything I have read from him has been directly on point but yet literally decades ahead of its time.

anon2020dot00 4y ago

Great quote and it speaks to how we need to curate on where we spend our attention on since there is an over-abundance of information in the internet.

a_square_peg 4y ago

That's a fantastic quote - thanks for sharing!

saint_abroad 4y ago

I'd corrupt the quote slightly to factor informational effects of propaganda: "a wealth of [conflicting] information creates [an apathy] of attention and a need to [withdraw] that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." In this way, information sources can destroy attention rather than foster efficient allocation (which is hard work).