Summary: The text discusses the concept of the “attention economy,” highlighting how information consumes people’s attention while emphasizing the importance of “information condensers” in organizations. It reflects on the challenges of maintaining focus in a world filled with distractions from smartphones and social media, which often prioritize grabbing attention over providing meaningful content. The author also shares insights from Chris Hayes’ book and his own experiences in condensing large amounts of information into digestible formats.
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. (View Highlight)
What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, [Simon argues], “the crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system… To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system must be an information condenser.” (View Highlight)
Our phones are addictive because they’re interesting. They’re addictive because they do a good job of condensing the iceberg. (View Highlight)
One of dopamine’s key roles is to alert your brain to surprising developments, situations where the outcomes deviate from your predictions, where something novel appears to be happening. Dopamine effectively converts novelty and surprise into interest and attention. (View Highlight)
condensing skills of a tool like NotebookLM actually deepens my understanding of the material. (View Highlight)