We wake up each day with the same attention budget as everyone else. This is the one thing all humans equally share.

Spending that attention budget by doing this is what gives meaning to our lives.
It's is only through doing that we learn. It is only through learning that we find meaning.
Yet many of us waste attention budget exclusively on consumption. Seeking the random dopamine hits that tickle our curiosity. Yet we seek only the convenient things to do.
Activities that are convenient, that takes little effort don't consume a lot of attention. But enough of these small distractions will. But unfortunately, there's little learning taking place.
The struggle we all face in our modern information abundant society is finding a purposeful and thus meaningful focus to spend our attention budget. The Japanese Ikigai is all about doing.
Ikigai is about doing with a purpose. We structure our lives through work because work gives structure to all the smaller tasks that we do. Greater meaning is gained through structured doing. This is what it means to do things with a purpose.
Wealth is therefore quantified as the fraction of your daily attentional budget that is spent on doing what you love, you are good at, and what others need. All of these can only be found through learning.
A flow state is a consequence of competence. It's not your attention that is trained, it is the introspection of your proficiency at a task. It is that mental state where time ceases to exist. Yet, it cannot be reached without a mastery of something.
Introspection is valuable, but inward attention by itself does not lead to meaning. Someone who is depressed spends a lot of time in inward introspection. What is key is the mastering of one's introspection. This can only be learned through structured attention.
Meditation is the mastery of one's attention. Although this practice is commonly associated with Eastern religions, you can also find it in more mature Judeo-Christian faiths.
Civilization and technology both compete for your attention at the same time offer the opportunity to gain more control of one's attention. Both provide conveniences that previously did not exist.
It is the allure of these conveniences that also takes away from our ability to do things. Many people find meaning in cooking, but we never experience this if we always conveniently order cooked meals.
But progress does not prevent you from cooking. It is your choice if you want to do this or not, and this is what technology provides. That is the choice as to where you focus your attention.
What technology been conspicuously absent is in the tools that teach you how to structure your attention. The greatest competency we will ever find is the competency over our own minds.

More from Carlos E. Perez

Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?


I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.

explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?

An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.

The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.

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This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?