That was my experience: it took 10 years of work before my chosen profession started to make sense.
Peter Norvig says “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” and it rings true for me.
Ten years from now . . . what did you do with the decade? Why not get really, really good at something?
“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.”
– Herbert Simon
Input ___, information. What is the answer?
Input ___, output attention. What is the answer?
There is an input/output chain here. If this quote is right, attention must be protected from information.
But this assumes attention is a finite resource. Is that true?
Of course, these words are weasel words. What does “information” mean? What does “attention” mean?
This may be a fatuous, midwit quote with no there there. After all, I found it on Twitter. The initial assumption must be that everything is fatuous, everything has a purpose: “Look at me! I am very smart!”
But I’m still interested in the idea that attention can get tiny and laser-focused or instantly expand to enormous with infinite capacity, can deflect or absorb at will.
Dostoevsky observing a society ball:
“Everybody is wearing new clothes and no one knows how to wear them, everybody makes merry and no one is merry, everybody is ambitious and no one knows how to make the most of himself, everybody is envious, everybody keeps silent and everybody shuns everyone else. They even do not know how to dance.”
@porkchop_EXP on Twitter