I take Adderall by legal prescription to treat diagnosed ADHD. All it does for me is make it possible for me to “buckle down” and work on something. I don’t get cleverer. I can just keep myself on-task like normal people do.

Now I really wish Adderall did for me what it did for Foer….I could use a little mental performance enhancement.

Or google it for other formats. Or google it if my link freaked out.

Influence: getting others to do what they otherwise would not have done, ostensibly because these actions would be in the influencer’s own interests.

Payment: (a) reward for the expenditure of effort for the production of value consumed by a third party; (b) the most direct way to influence people.

Influencing someone, therefore, is only as valuable as what that person can do for you as a result of being influenced, and paying someone to let you attempt to influence them only makes when the total expected cost (the payment for attention and the effort of influencing adjust for the expected rate of failure of the attempt to influence) is less than paying people directly. Thus, any payment made will not be for the effort of attention (as attention requires little extra effort – unless we are asleep, we are paying attention to *something*), but as part pre-payment for the effort of some future action.

Because of this, I can see scope for a system in which people are directly paid for watching advertising (whether for product or base politics, in the latter case with existing supporters paying to acquire new supporters), but never for the consumption of content they would consume of their own accord. After all, the only reason anyone would do anything of their own accord is if they get out of it more than they put into it.

Of course, there is some satisfaction from the knowledge that people are paying attention and reacting to your work, but that satisfaction stems from the fact that they pay attention freely, of their own accord, and without the expectation of further reward. They pay attention to your work because it benefits them, to the extent that one would be able to charge them money for it, were one so inclined. The satisfaction comes from knowing that such high value is accorded to the the fruits of one’s internal efforts (e.g. thoughts, and as opposed to the apples one can grow and sell in the market). And it does not matter if there is reaction or not – Stephen King, for instance, probably does not care about how tangible the reaction to his work is of every of his readers. IN any case, start paying the audience for attention and reaction, and this satisfaction disappears and we are back to the dynamics described above.

Information is useful but psycho-social emotional health is ESSENTIAL.  Meditation is a cheap, self-contained way to maintain one’s emotional well-being!  Sure, meditators process more information better.  Great. But if there is psychosis, then who cares how much information?  It would be getting processed through faulty hardware! It would be like talking about powering Deep Blue with car batteries and a hamster wheel.

This actually corresponds to my philosophy of focus and defocus. I try to shift between periods of intense focus of particular tasks, in which large blocks of time and mental effort are used to resolve major “nuts to crack” and periods of defocus during which I free associate, and collect the components for focused work.

For example, in a recent project I collected the parts for a sous vide cooker and surfed the web for best implementations while defocused. I then spent several hours of focused work to implement the  cooker.

Attention and distraction, focus and defocus are rather like momentum and position in quantum mechanics, quantities which are not antithetical but instead must be balanced.

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Work-Alienation-Autonomy-Semiotext/dp/1584350768/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

On a half-related node: Perhaps the reader-producer relationship is going to come swinging around. If attention, and allowing ourselves to be influenced, is worth something (may in fact be the most valuable thing in a networked society) then isn’t the value-relationship turned on its head? This is at least how it has seemed to me the last while. What if you get paid to consume. Why would someone do that? Because your mind is the only place host a meme. You don’t need attention to spread, but to influence. So if you construct an idea and you want impact you need attention. I wonder if there are already examples?

it is not the information itself that does the consuming, it is the processing of information itself, as performed by the attendee who is also the owner of the attention in the first place.

when you point with your finger somewhere and say “Look!” to me, and i look … doesn’t this mean i no longer control my own attention? 

so the problem is imho that people need to learn how to control their own attention.

to some degree people’s bodies act like the bodies of sheep; you can watch this phenomenon in a group of six-year-old boys playing soccer. from a bodily perspective our attention seems to prefer being in sync with other people’s attention. 

so what “device” do we have to control our own attention, when our mind is part of our body and our body prefers to “follow” the shared attention?

how do we learn to control our own attention,
assuming that “our” attention is ours indeed?

best regards, Ron

Attention could be the real value when everything is networked: http://lukas.ahrenberg.se/archives/542

Attention consumes information and the amount of information we would need to consume depends on what it is we desire to accomplish. An overabundance of information only becomes detrimental here if what one desires to accomplish is to consume all of the information available, for its own sake.

(well, somebody had to)