With bounded attention, noticing less relevant things more puts you into a worse position to be aware of the worlds you actually live in.
Edit: Steven’s comment gives a more central interpretation of the post, namely as a warning against the bailey/motte pair of effectively disbelieving something and defending that state of mind by claiming it’s irrelevant. (I think the motte is also invalid, it’s fine to be agnostic about things, even relevant ones. If hypothetically irrelevance argues against belief, it argues against disbelief as well.)
All information has a cost (time is a finite resource), the value of any arbitrary bit of information is incredibly variable, and there is essentially infinite information out there, including tremendous amounts of “junk”.
Therefore, if you spend time on low-value information, claiming that it has non-zero positive value, then you have that much less time to spend on the high-value information that matters. You’ll spend your conversation energy towards trivialities and dead-ends, rather than on the central principle. You’ll scoop up grains of sand while ignoring the pearls next to you, so to speak. And that’s bad.
With bounded attention, noticing less relevant things more puts you into a worse position to be aware of the worlds you actually live in.
Edit: Steven’s comment gives a more central interpretation of the post, namely as a warning against the bailey/motte pair of effectively disbelieving something and defending that state of mind by claiming it’s irrelevant. (I think the motte is also invalid, it’s fine to be agnostic about things, even relevant ones. If hypothetically irrelevance argues against belief, it argues against disbelief as well.)
Agreed.
All information has a cost (time is a finite resource), the value of any arbitrary bit of information is incredibly variable, and there is essentially infinite information out there, including tremendous amounts of “junk”.
Therefore, if you spend time on low-value information, claiming that it has non-zero positive value, then you have that much less time to spend on the high-value information that matters. You’ll spend your conversation energy towards trivialities and dead-ends, rather than on the central principle. You’ll scoop up grains of sand while ignoring the pearls next to you, so to speak. And that’s bad.
(See the edit in the grandparent, my initial interpretation of the post was wrong.)