There's Always Room at the Top

On the allocation of social and economic capital

Jul 31, 2024

“There is always room at the top!”

Suppose that this is something my grandfather used to often say. I’m not sure if he was talking about The Big Top? 🎪 Probably not. I can be convinced pretty easily that he was talking about the economy. We pay a lot of attention to the economy. We coddle it. We get scared when the line goes red, goes down… 🤡

We are very lucky that modern money has no real intrinsic value and that it doesn’t really matter how much of it can exist forgotten under mattresses. It makes a difference to the owner who needs it but has forgotten it, or the finder who spends it.

Aside from these kinds of personal situations the inefficiencies of the modern economy doesn’t really affect anything. They just add more money to the economy until there is growth and productivity. Modern currency solves a lot of resource allocation and development problems. It can be replaced easily and cheaply if too much of it “puddles up” or slows in velocity. Money is not a fixed resource (and it has artificial scarcity).

But attention is a fixed scarce resource—and its inefficiencies are killing a lot more people.

Somewhat ironically we humans pay more attention to the economy than the paying-attention-to-the-wrong-thing problem.

Can everyone be elite? It seems impossible by definition. I don't think saturation or centralization are inherently bad things but they are the very things that keeps the long tail flat. In other words, more people can be leaders when power is distributed. But this isn't necessarily better if people are marking selfish decisions or simply decisions which are, on average, worse than before.

Attention is the allocation of cognitive resources to prioritize certain sensory inputs, thoughts, or tasks. Attention is the ability to choose what to think about. For the prefrontal cortex, attention _is_ cognition.

Money is easily reused and cheaply recreated but attention can only be used once and then gone forever!

I want to make it clear that attention is not the same as time. You can waste a man's brain whether he is rotting in a jail cell or not. It is a lot cheaper to not educate people and have them poorly manage their time rather than locking them up. You can control what people think about, what they worry about, with a TV set, a small camera, and an compelling story. Cognition requires time but it is not the same thing as it. It's not obvious what one can do if they feel that they are poorly managing their time--but it is pretty obvious what one needs to do when they realize they are poorly choosing things to pay attention to.

We might feel that we have more control over the economy than we have over our conscousness—but this is pretty strange! The opposite is much more true. We can choose what to think about. Only a small number of people control how much currency is injected into the economy.

Perhaps the thing stopping us is some is our rugged individualism? Do we feel that we shouldn’t think about the allocation of cognitive resources as a group of people due to ideals of autonomy? Do we not have a sense of self or community? Maybe it is this.

But other people have external motivations for distracting you. Distractions can be rapidly converted to economic capital. I'm not really talking about surface level wallet-gone street magic/theft but rather you convince yourself that you may as well spend $20 here and there because you've already spent so long thinking about something that it has become your hobby.

I feel very strongly that it is much more important that we develop theory for correctly allocating cognitive resources. Right now we don’t really have that. We just have macro-economics.

Economics is fun to study—it might even help you as an individual (or organization) find a competative advantage or do some arbitrage—although it doesn’t necessarily help humans as a whole. Perhaps economics is your gateway drug to start pay attention to the needs and wants of people around you and while doing so you filled a gap in goods or services in your community. In that role you started to pay more close attention to the world around you: the resources deficencies of potential customers. You and your customers benefit from the attention that you gave them at one point in your life.

But your small business could have more customers. This is one of the inefficiencies that is supposedly “solved” by advertisements and marketing. There are many people who don’t know you exist and don’t know why they should care to pay attention to your spiel.

American-style advertisements demand your attention only to attempt to entertain you. But I don’t think this is really helpful. Advertisements are making us more distracted because they are often out-of-context. Within end-game capitalism they exist mostly to re-inforce the status quo: to help you choose McDonald or BurgerKing before you’ve forgotten how funny the commercial was. Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob: who is the RIGHT choice?!

I would argue that good advertisements educate people about things that they didn’t know. Goods and services available to them that they previously believed weren’t possible or didn’t exist so they never bothered paying attention to their own desires and going out and looking for the store. Yes, DORITOS® Tortilla Chips & CHEETOS® Cheese Flavored Snacks Mix Variety Pack exists!

Okay, maybe this conclusion is not that profound. But as a fellow grocery store aisle curator&connessoire I must belabour. It is pretty easy to see what exists when giving full attention to the aisles. But it is difficult to do this when you are bored of it or your mind wants to think about something else which seems more important. Maybe there are other, more important, things to think about? What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? How do we quantify and prioritize things to think about? How do we ensure this aligns with what is maximally beneficial to us?

Keeping track of what people know, what they like, and who they know, is a very privacy invasive, totalitarian, way of delivering suggestions. This is how modern advert-schlepping works—but it’s not really all that useful when the only companies that have money to throw on ads are the ones that are very well known.

The same applies to non-advertisments.

We get suggestions from recommendation systems which rely on similar data. Often, it's not obvious that us discovering something is the result of this system--like being able to see certain comments on social media apps while other people see other comments, or seeing places that you're more likely to go to in Google Maps rather than seeing a more detailed map. There is often too many comments, too many choices, and so we are given something that the computer curated. This is necessary but also dangerous. It's not a given that these systems will be in controlled by people that have equality and fairness in mind. In fact, the social media algorithms want you to see the comments that get you commenting so they'll show you the thing that pushes your button.

This is narrowcasting on a global scale which enables the shaping of public opinion in more descrete ways than having a newscaster who tells you what to believe. There is no simple solution to this problem but it is definitely worth solving and it should be enforced by policy. Recommender systems can also create echo chambers where people never get outside their local maxima bubble and try something "undiscovered" by their recommendation cluster.

The number of people thrust into public consciousness is already fully saturated. There's something for every single demographic and every race and ethnicity, all the time. There is no longer space for small-town celebrities. There is no room at the top. You might get rich but you aren't going to ever get popular--neither globally nor locally.

The allocation of social resources on the internet is fundamentally incompatible with the limits of human attention. Not living locally is the root cause of the loneliness epidemic.

The problem of allocation is also the problem of inallocation. Attention is always paid detrimental to something else—I say this especially with regard to the national and global level of human attention.

Humans have a very limited attention span. Our working memory expires in seconds not hours. Currency does not expire. Even if you consider inflation or demurrage there is no contest.

I don't think it makes a significant difference whether a person has $10m or $100m. This person will likely spend the same amount of money--or the money will be traded at a much, much lower average velocity _per capita_ compared to 1,000 people with $1000. The allocation of time and waste of cognition is the opposite of this.

We can't inject more time into the economy. The ML/AI people are trying to inject more cognition into the economy and that might work if they are fully autonomous agents--but if they are just truncating/summarizing/interpreting content (big data into human working memory) then it is only serving humanity by making the people with pre-existing power feel more confident in their own inaccuracies--which distracts them more from paying attention to things that might matter.

As the natural limit of a _democracy_ is that distance from the central point which will just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand, and will include no greater number than can join in those functions; so the natural limit of a _republic_ is that distance from the centre which will barely allow the representatives to meet as often as may be necessary for the administration of public affairs.
The Federalist Papers: No. 14

This quote is a deep cut but I think it parallels nicely here. Do we want to have our relationships and favorite music chosen by spatial auto-correlation, randomness, democratic evaluation, or chosen for us by representatives who we barely know and who don't know us at all?

What is the natural limit of attention, of discoverability? Is there something deeper which binds us together? A cognitive mapping and clustering? The current situation does not inspire confidence for life in a future where we turn the planet into a big global brain.

It wasn’t always like this. In the past there would be natural limits to popularity. The main problem is amplification. Broadcasting is a self-reinforcing system which favors people, places, and things which are already known.

Before the internet, it was harder to become famous. People and news were mostly known within their local areas because spreading information took more time and effort. You needed to get past the people who controlled what got shared, like newspaper editors or TV producers.

Then the internet came along and changed everything. It made it easy for anyone to share things and reach a lot of people. But instead of spreading fame around, the internet has actually made it easier for a few big companies to grab everyone's attention. These companies are the same ones that run TV channels, so they're really good at making sure their stories and stars get seen by lots of people.

The real issue is that once something or someone gets popular, it keeps getting more popular. This happens because the way we share news and stories online helps things that are already known to get even more attention. This makes it tough for new ideas or people to get noticed, because the system keeps pushing what's already popular. This means we hear about the same things and people a lot, and it's harder to learn about new or different ideas.

To change this, we need to do the opposite of what broadcasting does. Instead of mindless consuming what is promoted, we have to search and find small voices. This approach is sometimes called "broadcatching." It's about being intentional in our search for content and not just passively consuming what's popular. By doing this, we can discover stories and opinions that are different and might not be on the main stage. It's a way to break the cycle of only hearing from the same loud voices.

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