A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
"What Information Consumes Is Attention" and The Thermodynamics of Communication
Summary:
Herbert Simon's quote about information consuming attention is a crucial point to consider.
Emails can be overwhelming, as there is a limit to the amount of time and attention we have. It is important not to solely rely on the internet as a copying machine, but to acknowledge the real material scarcities and limitations.
While there is room for improvement, there are still real world limits to communication effectiveness.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
Herbert Simon's famous 1971 quote that what information consumes is attention feels like such a crucial point that I made it my email signature you know because like you said earlier Glenn that you know the value is really in in the relationships and there are differentially scalable qualities here I think a lot about the way and Doug Rushkoff and others have pointed Out that you can have at least you know indefinitely many emails a day but you only have so much time and attention to read them and that this is part of the argument for the importance of Not just following the sort of logic of the internet as a great copying machine off a cliff right where we're imagining an abundance that is nonetheless still founded in real material Scarcities you know like David Wolpert talks about you know the thermodynamics of communication and there being a theoretical limit to how effective that can be and while we still Have plenty of room you know orders of magnitude to improve on that you know that there are these real world limits that we're eventually going to bump up into
Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
The Small Animal Replacement Problem in Animal Advocacy
Summary:
Choosing a meat tax as a form of advocacy may seem logical, but it can actually lead to a shift in consumption from red meat to white meat like chicken and fish.
This shift increases the number of animals farmed overall, which is known as the small animal replacement problem.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The vast difference in choosing one campaign over another and how much difference you can have between the two. But actually, not only that, just highlighting the damage you can do. That was so enlightening for me. I think I've never thought about it like that before. I think specifically we were working with an organisation on whether doing a meat tax would be an effective form of advocacy. On the surface, you're like, oh, meat tax, yeah, it makes sense. It's the same as cigarette, alcohol or other kind of syntaxes that we have in the UK. It's just put a tax on me and then less consumption, less demand, etc. Then just kind of flippantly thinking about it in that sense and then the team did an in-depth report and actually kind of long story short. I would recommend going and reading the report if you're interested. But essentially consumption moves generally from the red meat from an environmental or health perspective and that's what in the UK, that's the only way that could be passed is through An environmental or health committee. Yeah, like a carbon tax on food products, that kind of thing. Right, exactly. And actually all that does is move consumption from red meat cows to white meat, like chicken and fish. And so actually for looking at numbers, comparatively farming one cow versus 50 chickens that it would take to be comparable, the numbers are huge and even more so for fish and probably Shrimp as we were talking about before. So actually just that shifting consumption was going to increase the amount of animals that were farmed. And so all of a sudden within a short space of time, we've gone from, or I certainly did, I feel like the team have more experienced some more skeptical and it's called the small animal Replacement problem. And we've been talking about this for a long time.
Introducing — How I Learned to Love Shrimp
How I Learned to Love Shrimp
Everyone has a firmly held belief that an equally smart and informed person disagrees with.