Ulysse Pence

AboutProjectsPodcastNewsletterWriting

Pay Attention to Attention

August 11th, 2020

Note: I am not an expert in the field of attention/attention economics and this essay should not be considered a systematic review of the literature. This is a tour of some of the more interesting features of the space.

Attention is not something people often think of as a scarce resource, yet a common refrain today is that attention spans are too short and everyone's looking at screens waiting for the next dopamine hit.

It's only in its absence that you notice how critical attention is in your life. And it's not just your time that's at risk when you have reduced attention. Finishing an important project for work is nearly impossible when your mind is on nagging personal issues. Making important decisions is risky when your friends keep calling your phone. Driving a car is outright dangerous when the heated argument in the backseat spills over into the driver's seat.

But before you start thinking of all your personal issues that may be stealing your attention, consider that the biggest attention thieves may be external: your phone, your computer, your TV, billboards, and the people around you. And what they say to your attention is just as important as the fact that they've got it. So if you only care about your attention for one reason, let it be this: When others steal your attention, your ability to process information and make good decisions is compromised.

Problem 1: The Truth is at Stake

In a 1990 series of psychology studies [0], Gilbert, Krull, and Malone found that participants accepted false information more often when they were frequently interrupted. Even “merely comprehending a false proposition increased the likelihood that subjects would later consider it true.”

Based on these findings, Eliezer Yudkowsky, creator of the Less Wrong online rationalist community, explains that “...we should be more careful when we expose ourselves to unreliable information, especially if we’re doing something else at the time [1].” But where does this unreliable information come from? Unfortunately, one of the primary sources of misinformation is also one of the most popular sources of information: news media.

The narrative-driven journalism in news media tends to present specific kinds of stories [2]. Most news outlets tightly couple the presentation of what happened with its interpretation. But unlike a game of Connect the Dots, where there's a singular underlying shape or motif across all the points in front of you, stories about humans are complicated. People can make conflicting interpretations of how an event occurred and both be correct. The physical world is only the tangible gateway to our lived experiences; the inter-subjective tapestry of shared stories that people weave together is mutable and self-contradictory.

In Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, former CIA analyst Richards J. Heuer, Jr suggests that “exposure to blurred or ambiguous stimuli interferes with accurate perception even after more and better information becomes available.” [3] Therefore, as the news continually constructs these interpretations of events, it becomes harder to understand what is really happening on a larger scale. And split-brain experiments [4] have demonstrated that we're quite good at fitting circumstances into an arbitrary story.

If people watch the news to be informed, why would a news organization guide the narrative in their investigation towards potentially misleading stories? Stories are helpful in some respects, but ultimately news is not about communicating information. It is about getting recurring customers and making sure customers keep reading/viewing the stories. And no one will do that unless they feel informed and entertained.

A news story that doesn't fit into a reader/viewer's understanding of how the world works could cause them discomfort as they grapple with why someone would do something they couldn't predict. And a news story that doesn't have obvious pathos may be boring. To that end, I tend to see three main categories of new stories:

You may wonder how, for example, a high school junior dying in a car accident (tragedy), a business stealing from its customers (outrage), or an old man coping with his wife's death by writing her letters (“now isn't that something”) are “predictable”. Well, they're predictable if we believe in the simplistic stories about the world that the news puts forward:

News media is programming us to contextualize the actions of others in an oversimplified and traditional story mode: there's good and there's evil and the line between them is obvious, leaders that exhibit uncertainty and give credence to conflicting beliefs are unprincipled and populist, cultures are either worse, the same, or better than our own, etc.

In the movie Requiem for a Dream, Sara Goldfarb, suffering from amphetamine addiction, experiences a game show as reality [5]. As if responding to a light up applause sign, the game show audience laughs at the decrepit state of Sara's apartment and her appearance. She asks for them to let her “explain”, but the one-dimensional audience only operates in modes of anticipation, praise, and ridicule.

Distilling how the world works down into these simple stories does not accurately portray how it really works. These stories don't make for a good sense-making apparatus. If you try to accurately and granularly predict the future or explain the past, the stories from news media simply don't make sense unless you ignore the details, but then you no longer have a useful tool.

Problem 2: “Good Feels” Feedback Loop

But news media is only a part of an even larger source of misinformation: corporate branding. A brand is made up of both a corporation's product and the aesthetic that goes along with it. Apple isn't just making computer hardware and software, they are selling you a smart, chic, minimalist, adventurous, and romantic lifestyle aesthetic. Nike isn't just making sports wear, they are selling an active, determined, powerful, hardcore, and resilient lifestyle aesthetic [6]. Like news, they are selling a story, a story about what you are when you buy into their product.

When a corporation puts out a story, an ad campaign, it makes you feel good: A car driving through the open countryside, two people making jokes while eating a fast food sandwich, a girl showing her grandfather pictures of his former wife on her smartphone. Then the ad shows the brand.

Similar to in the psychology study, our minds misstep and create an association between the feeling and the brand. As the connection builds over repeated exposure, we will become a little more likely to buy product or continue buying the product. And we start to like the brand.

And liking the brand has all kinds of compounding advantages for the corporation: You're more likely to tell someone else about the brand. You're more likely to pay attention to messaging from the brand. You're more likely to like anything associated with the brand. You're more likely to forgive the brand for bad PR.

Exploiting people's brain chemistry is not new. It is the norm in the business world. The smartphone is the greatest example. Receiving a notification vibration, sound, or visual cue triggers a pleasurable emotional response for most of us because something great has happened: your crush texted you, someone liked your social media post, your paycheck email came in, or you're receiving a reminder to play your favorite mobile game.

Whatever the notification may be, as soon as we know something pleasurable is about to happen, we start to feel that pleasure. And the sooner the pleasure's going to come, the more it excites us [7] and reinforces a positive association with the experience. At some point, we feel most of the pleasure in the lead up [8], rather than in the actual pleasurable experience itself. And that's exactly what these notifications are: multi-sensory notifications that pleasure is coming, brought to you by a corporation.

Not only are corporations manipulating us into interacting with their brands, but the constant bombardment with all of these notifications and fun aesthetics make it difficult to stay focused. How many times has a listicle or personalized ad caught your attention? How many unsolicited emails have you received after signing up on a website or buying something online? How many TV and YouTube commercials have you watched in your life? How many tweets have you accidentally read that turned out to be advertisements? How many Reddit posts are just creating buzz for a movie's debut?

All these interruptions are a Tragedy of the Commons. Each startup, entrepreneur, marketer, and ads platform developer sends out a small attention grab. Individually, they are a small attention debt to pay. Combined, they are a catastrophic force drowning the attention commons in endless distractions and misinformation. Context-switching whenever we see an ad undermines our ability to focus. Unfortunately, creating interruptions is exceedingly simple and cheap. An app developer could write a few lines of code that sends a notification to every user every hour (although send too many and users will turn off notifications or uninstall the app [9]).

We justify it by saying engagement is consent and people who don't want to consume these interruptions can ignore them or unsubscribe or opt-out. But most people I know lose emails in the ether of spam. They pull out their phones to check tweet engagements while we spend time together. They sabotage their bedtime scrolling through Facebook.

Combating the notification-pleasure feedback loop head-on is near to impossible. None of us are actually rational agents. We regularly fail to make good trade-offs, choosing the pleasure now over the greater reward later.

Solution 1: View Attention as a Resource. Don't Give it Up.

What can we do? I've found changing how I think about it and how I structure my day has significantly reduced the problem.

The first step is to acknowledge that attention is important. Having more attention will not only improve your filter on false information, but also aid in engendering new thoughts. Note-taking book authors Sönke Ahrens and David Allen advocate for closing as many “open loops” in your mind as possible because you need your attention to make connections between what you already know in order to produce new ideas [10] [11].

Therefore, when designing your home or work office, consider what could pull your attention away from your focus: your bookshelf, the activity outside your window, your children barging in, the phone on your desk, etc. When deciding on a recreational activity, bear in mind how trivial it is for businesses to inject their ideas through your attention. When adjusting your environment to encourage a new behavior, make doing the new behavior obvious so it doesn't need your attention [12].

The second step is to invert the problem [13]. We don't have to adopt a whole new lifestyle like stoicism or monasticism to retain control of our attention. Instead we will identify the sources of attention abuse and simply avoid them. Aim for a high Return on Attention [14]; when you spend your attention on something, prefer things that are more likely to be true and bring you closer to achieving your goals.

With respect to receiving misinformation, we will choose to receive less. That means consuming less news, especially TV news [15] and getting used to not knowing what the dickens is going on in the world. You probably didn't know anyway. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4 Hour Work Week, recommends a “Low-Information Diet”, [16] reading only headlines and listening to what friends mention in passing.

Unless your job is largely affected by current events (e.g. investing, politics, farming subsidies), you don't really need to be informed at this granularity. Any social movement that resonates with a substantial number of people will spillover into other parts of your life anyway.

A good news organization should tell us what facts they know and with what certainty, and even summarize and contextualize events into larger events as they unfold, but should not create stories with good guys and bad guys. Let us sit with what we've read and heard and talk to others and come to our own conclusions. It's dangerous to centralize truth telling, especially when many local news stations in the United States are owned by a handful of companies [17].

My recommendation is to consume news infrequently and when you do, read long form pieces in publications that tend to tell more nuanced stories like The Economist, Financial Times, Niskansen Center, Fair Observer, and Palladium Magazine. Get information from multiple sources and use their arguments to supplement your own. The print medium is a bit duller and I think that's what we need in order to grapple with the subtleties of human agency. I don't really understand my own mind... how could a 30 second TV news segment even begin to explain how a community of humans interact, let alone a global one?

To avoid seeing advertising online, install ad block software like uBlock Origin or Ad Block Plus in your web browser. To refrain from seeing advertising on TV, just don't watch TV. Pretty much everything is available through online streaming services or a quick web search [18].

What about email? Most emails from companies have an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom. Click on those. Or if they don't, learn to use your email provider's filtering tools. Whenever I get an email that I never want to get again, I create a filter to archive it so I never have to see it again. For example, in GMail, try searching for subject:{(privacy policy) (terms of use) (terms of service)} [19] and creating a filter to exclude these results. If that doesn't work, mark the email as spam and hopefully your email provider will figure it out next time. Tiago Forte, productivity blogger, has additional tips for reducing email [20].

Solution 2: Reduce and Consolidate Interruptions

Avoiding misinformation and pollution of your mind is only half the battle. Often the notifications you receive are useful, but distributed evenly over the course of a day/week, they make it impossible to think.

In fact, the folks at the Center For Applied Rationality believe the “attention we lose first is the most valuable” [21]. Getting a series of interruptions in a short amount of time is bad, but really it's the first one that displaces our attention. Therefore, we should be strict about this. Don't try to reduce interruptions, try to completely eliminate them.

One of the best ways to do this is to shift from an “interrupt”-driven mindset to a “polling” one. Interrupt vs polling is a concept from Computer Science that describes how a computer program can find out if anything important has happened while it was busy doing other stuff. The interrupt-driven approach means that whenever something relevant to the computer program happens (some data has arrived from the Internet, the user pushes a button, a file is done loading, etc), it is notified immediately and drops everything it's doing to handle the interrupt. On the other hand, polling is when the computer program is not interrupted, but regularly checks (polls) to see if anything has happened. Each has its place in different parts of the computer ecosystem.

Most of us are living with an interrupt-driven mindset, where we're constantly available for other people and machines to interrupt us. But most of these interruptions, while seemingly time-sensitive, are not actually important and could be deferred for hours, days, or even weeks. A helpful mechanism for moving away from interrupts and towards polling is to use a pomodoro timer. Set a timer for 25 minutes and make it impossible for others to reach you: activate “Do Not Disturb” mode on the phone, close chat/email programs, and wear headphones to ignore local sounds. Focus for the 25 minutes and afterwards, feel free to check your phone notifications.

As you get better, adopt a more permanent polling mindset:

The Result

Once you've consolidated your interruptions with a polling mindset, you can partition your day into manager and maker [26] (or similarly, shallow obligations and dedicated deep time stretches [27]) parts. One part of the day will be dedicated to tasks that are quick and require a lot of context switching (manager work). The other part of the day will be dedicated to going deep into your work (maker / creator work). Gather everything you will need to complete the work, write down all unrelated thoughts lingering in your mind (you can come back to them later), set out your intentions, and do it.

Interestingly, Barbara Oakley, co-creator of the popular Learning How to Learn online course, says that people that have a smaller working memory tend to have more creative strength [28]. So we could speculate that the periods where you are more distracted moving between many tasks at once, there's the opportunity for you to be more creative, although there is no direct evidence.

At the very least, reducing distractions and misinformation in your life will have a positive effect on your mental health. Since I started noticing the trends in news stories and corporate branding, I've found myself wasting less time reading articles that are the equivalent of junk food. Since re-engineering how I use my phone, I've noticed a drop in FOMO and a tangible improvement in how I engage with the people I love.

It seems unlikely that the attention landscape will change in the near future, so I suggest taking control over your attention from others as much as possible. Your thoughts and actions matter and deserve your attention. Don't let anyone take that away.

To hear more, subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.

Footnotes