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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #184 (Attention)

Published 19 days ago • 5 min read

Family Photo:
Attention

Calvin and Lawrence staged a glowstick performance for their stuffies, sponsored by the Summit 2025 vendors. I don't know what vendor sponsored the glowsticks—their name either fell off or was never attached to the styrofoam.

Tradeshows are competitions for attention. The competition is frequently embodied in SWAG: stuff vendors give out for free to entice people walking the tradeshow floor to talk to them. The stuff can vary from branded pens, to stuffed animals, to glowsticks, to raffles for iPads or autographed basketballs or guitars.

Whenever I go to tradeshows, I try to keep an eye out for things that Calvin or Lawrence would enjoy seeing in my suitcase when I come home. The fact I am rarely the target customer for any vendor at these tradeshows has never been an issue in this attention exchange.

On this last trip, I brought back Calvin a stuffed bear, and a giraffe for Lawrence.
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When I showed them their loot, Lawrence asked, "Daddy, can you keep getting giraffes for me when you go on your work trips?...Then I'll have a bazillion of giraffes."

So Lawrence wants me to take more trips—said differently, he values a week of my physical attention less than he values a stuffed giraffe. That finding is perhaps lower than I would have liked.

Room to improve.

--

I have other thoughts on attention, but I've also been pretty sick this week: more attention spent on breathing through coughing fits than would be desirable. Maybe my attention will circle back to this topic again soon.

Dad Jokes:
Lack of Attention

Source: The Onion

Highlights:
Peak Attention

Practicing the Presence by Brother Lawrence (1692) - H/T Aaron Jennings

I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is attention.
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I carry on a habitual silent and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy. I live as if there were no one, save God and me in the world. The most holy and necessary practice in our spiritual life is the presence of God.
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That means finding constant pleasure in this divine company, speaking humbly and lovingly with Him in all seasons at every moment, without limiting the conversation in any way. There is no sweeter manner of living in the world than continuous communion with God.
...
​
It is not necessary to have great things to do. I turn my little omelette in the pan for the love of God. The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer. And in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in His great tranquility as if I were on my knees.
​
If the vessel of our soul is still tossed with winds and storms, let us awake the Lord who reposes in it, and He will quickly calm the sea. A little lifting of the heart suffices. A little remembrance of God, one act of inward worship are prayers that, no matter how short, are nevertheless acceptable to God.

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 by Venkatesh Rao (2011)

Sure, corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
​
The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time. To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
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The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
...
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​Peak Attention and Alternative Attention Sources​
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I am not sure who first came up with the term Peak Attention, but the analogy to Peak Oil is surprisingly precise. It has its critics, but I think the model is basically correct.
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Peak Oil refers to a graph of oil production with a maxiwikmum called Hubbert’s peak, that represents peak oil production. The theory behind it is that new oil reserves become harder to find over time, are smaller in size, and harder to mine. You have to look harder and work harder for every new gallon, new wells run dry faster than old ones, and the frequency of discovery goes down. You have to drill more.
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There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind.
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Attention behaves the same way. Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
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But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.
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Sure, there is an equivalent to the Sun in the picture. Just ask anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation, and you’ll understand why the limits to attention (and therefore the value of time) are far further out than we think.
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The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
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The result is a spectacular kind of bubble-and-bust.

Attention is All you Need (2017)

(The paper that launched the GPT-AI Boom)

Abstract​
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The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or
convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best
performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention
mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer,
based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions
entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to
be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly
less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 Englishto-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including
ensembles, by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task,
our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after
training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the
best models from the literature.

iamJoshKnox Highlights:

AI Buzzword Bingo, by Cooptimize​
(Our attention mechanism at Summit 2025)

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Josh Knox

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