Useful to consider the difference between the things we pass off to other people so we can ignore them and the things we pretend to pass off to other people so we can collectively ignore. Or to put it another way, how distribution of responsibility can transform into an accountability sink.
Think the digital/data revolution has a weird distorting effect on this phenomenon. We now truly have the Borges library at our fingertips, in organisations (most of whom are data rich and insight poor) and in our personal lives. The issue being that the (effectively) infinite pool of information requires seemingly infinite navigation to discern the signal from the noise.
We end up feeling simultaneously like everything we need is accessible, while also constantly doubting if we picked the truthful edition or if it’s the one with the facts all reversed (to butcher the Borges story).
I particularly liked your comment about the fact that it's hard to choose to deliberately ignore things because to some extent that choice reminds us of our own finiteness (finity?) and mortality.
You see the same in business around the cousin choice of what not to see - what not to *do*. It's practically a truism that a decision *not* to do something is a far more powerful and effective management decision than a decision to do something - unlike the latter it can be implemented almost immediately with a near 100% success rate. But senior managers viscerally dislike taking those kind of decisions. It's a common problem in my consulting life, and 'it's the mortality stupid' is an interesting angle on the 'why' of that
The only way to have more than trivial behavioural flexibility is to have agency rather than hardwired, press here to ring the bell stimulus-response, and as a result, the very beginning of agency is the ability to ignore stimuli, even at the level of just freezing rather than instantly executing option x.
There's an infinite recursion here. To decide to ignore something, you have to have some idea what it is. So, there's a second level decision to be made, about what to decide about ignoring. And so on
In particular, this is why hierarchical Bayesianism can mitigate, but not solve, the problem of bounded awareness
“the connective tissue of society is the shared understanding that all the stuff we are ignoring is going to be taken care of by somebody else” - this is I feel the basic diagnosis of the particular way our Long Thatcherism experiment has played out in the UK. Just as in our constitution, so many bits of the connective tissue were not explicitly legible or instituted and so we haven’t had a good sense of how those things were damaged by particular changes - and so they weren’t replaced/ repaired and now we are at a point of “a lot of things don’t seem to be getting taken care of, how did that happen?”
> “The only people who try to pay attention to every single bit of information that they have all the time, are babies”.
> As a mid-morning DJ might say, please don’t write in.
Apologies for ignoring your request, but some Buddhists do this as well! Insight/vipassana meditation is the art of learning to direct your attention to the central message bus of the distributed system that is your mind. It's extremely weird and wonderful, and most descriptions sound like a fever dream. (If anyone's curious, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha is my book of choice; it's difficult territory to navigate without a book like this.)
Reading recommendation for you - A Field Guide to Earthlings by Ian Ford. It will entirely change the way you see autism vs neurotypicals along exactly these sorts of lines. Also a very good illustration of both the advantages and drawbacks to more vs less information absorbed from the environment.
I want to argue with the last paragraph, but I can’t tell whether there’s some insight there or whether I’m just being pedantic. Isn’t it necessarily true that a society of humans, being larger than any human but still small compared to the universe, necessarily ignores a near-infinite amount of the things to which it could possibly be paying attention?
William James is interesting--have you read "The Moral Equivalent of War"? Also apparently proposed the thought experiment that lead to "The Ones that Walk Away from Omelas" (so did Dostoevsky, but Le Guin says she got it from James).
I went through a massive American Pragmatists phase when I thought I might want to study philosophy properly, but haven't read James in more than 20 years. should probably go back
Useful to consider the difference between the things we pass off to other people so we can ignore them and the things we pretend to pass off to other people so we can collectively ignore. Or to put it another way, how distribution of responsibility can transform into an accountability sink.
that is a very good point which I don't think I'd considered
Think the digital/data revolution has a weird distorting effect on this phenomenon. We now truly have the Borges library at our fingertips, in organisations (most of whom are data rich and insight poor) and in our personal lives. The issue being that the (effectively) infinite pool of information requires seemingly infinite navigation to discern the signal from the noise.
We end up feeling simultaneously like everything we need is accessible, while also constantly doubting if we picked the truthful edition or if it’s the one with the facts all reversed (to butcher the Borges story).
I particularly liked your comment about the fact that it's hard to choose to deliberately ignore things because to some extent that choice reminds us of our own finiteness (finity?) and mortality.
You see the same in business around the cousin choice of what not to see - what not to *do*. It's practically a truism that a decision *not* to do something is a far more powerful and effective management decision than a decision to do something - unlike the latter it can be implemented almost immediately with a near 100% success rate. But senior managers viscerally dislike taking those kind of decisions. It's a common problem in my consulting life, and 'it's the mortality stupid' is an interesting angle on the 'why' of that
You might be interested by this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Agency-Behavioral-Organization-Lizards/dp/0262047004
The only way to have more than trivial behavioural flexibility is to have agency rather than hardwired, press here to ring the bell stimulus-response, and as a result, the very beginning of agency is the ability to ignore stimuli, even at the level of just freezing rather than instantly executing option x.
There's an infinite recursion here. To decide to ignore something, you have to have some idea what it is. So, there's a second level decision to be made, about what to decide about ignoring. And so on
In particular, this is why hierarchical Bayesianism can mitigate, but not solve, the problem of bounded awareness
“the connective tissue of society is the shared understanding that all the stuff we are ignoring is going to be taken care of by somebody else” - this is I feel the basic diagnosis of the particular way our Long Thatcherism experiment has played out in the UK. Just as in our constitution, so many bits of the connective tissue were not explicitly legible or instituted and so we haven’t had a good sense of how those things were damaged by particular changes - and so they weren’t replaced/ repaired and now we are at a point of “a lot of things don’t seem to be getting taken care of, how did that happen?”
> “The only people who try to pay attention to every single bit of information that they have all the time, are babies”.
> As a mid-morning DJ might say, please don’t write in.
Apologies for ignoring your request, but some Buddhists do this as well! Insight/vipassana meditation is the art of learning to direct your attention to the central message bus of the distributed system that is your mind. It's extremely weird and wonderful, and most descriptions sound like a fever dream. (If anyone's curious, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha is my book of choice; it's difficult territory to navigate without a book like this.)
Oh God, as someone whose fond of quoting POSIWID (especially when it comes to neoclassical economics), I am that bore! 🤣
Reading recommendation for you - A Field Guide to Earthlings by Ian Ford. It will entirely change the way you see autism vs neurotypicals along exactly these sorts of lines. Also a very good illustration of both the advantages and drawbacks to more vs less information absorbed from the environment.
I want to argue with the last paragraph, but I can’t tell whether there’s some insight there or whether I’m just being pedantic. Isn’t it necessarily true that a society of humans, being larger than any human but still small compared to the universe, necessarily ignores a near-infinite amount of the things to which it could possibly be paying attention?
William James is interesting--have you read "The Moral Equivalent of War"? Also apparently proposed the thought experiment that lead to "The Ones that Walk Away from Omelas" (so did Dostoevsky, but Le Guin says she got it from James).
I went through a massive American Pragmatists phase when I thought I might want to study philosophy properly, but haven't read James in more than 20 years. should probably go back
Mike Jackson (Critical Systems) grounded a lot of his stuff on the Pragmatists.