I remember when there was a lot of attention being given to Amanda Knox here on LW. Someone asked a similar question as you...something along the lines of “Why aren’t more people up in arms about this?”
The answer for me at that time was that I have a certain number of Attention Dollars to spend. People are wrongfully imprisoned all over the world every day. New video cards are too expensive. Kids are being tortured. McDonald’s stopped serving salads during the pandemic. There’s all sorts of things to spend my AD’s on.
Attention to causes and injustices costs AD and there is a high transaction cost to switching which injustices are important to me. I hypothesize that the complex system that is the-attention-of-public-discourse suffers from the same. There’s only so much capacity for giving attention to different causes, and switching those causes carries a high price.
That’s not to say Cause X is wrong or less important, only that I (and, hypothetically, public discourse) can only focus on a limited number of things, there’s costs to switching attention, and other things beat Cause X in the race to capture attention.
Different things probably come to the forefront through quirks of zeitgeist, personal relevance, effective messaging, attentional resources available at the time, and a dozen other subtle and not-so-subtle factors.
Of course, this doesn’t really answer your question (and here I am submitting it as an answer)! It only pushes the “why’s” to another level. Why can public discourse only focus on a limited number of things? Why, exactly, is it currently focusing on the things it is? Why are the transaction costs to switching attention high? I suspect that the answers are very complicated and unknown.
There is an economy of public attention. The amount of noise is high, and information asymmetries abound. If you think Cause X is not getting the amount of attention it should then you should work on lowering the information asymmetries and noise level...and recognize that if Cause X gets more attention it’ll mean Cause Y that everyone is currently paying attention to will get less attention. (At least if my model holds.)
Also, you say ”...suggests that a lot of abuse of power is going on.” I think that this conclusion depends a lot on your priors. One type of person is going to see a bad seed when they see this story, another type of person is going to see a corrupt institution. This feeds into this hypothetical economy of public attention.
How confident are you in this being the main reason and not other suggested reasons provided in this thread?
One type of person is going to see a bad seed when they see this story, another type of person is going to see a corrupt institution.
The fact that the story exists and there doesn’t seem to be a follow up and some agency felt it’s responsible for fixing the issue is part of the story.
You can argue that something is a bad apple when the bad apple gets removed by the owner when attention comes to it.
I remember when there was a lot of attention being given to Amanda Knox here on LW. Someone asked a similar question as you...something along the lines of “Why aren’t more people up in arms about this?”
My question isn’t about the number of people who are up in arms but about understanding the makeup of the modern left. In this thread you find people asserting that psychatristic patient are in a similar reference class as child abuse, animal suffering in factory farming and prisoners being mistreated. The fact that it gets a lot less attention then other topics in that reference class is what the question is about.
I would answer that systemic issues are more important then the fate of individual people. To the extend that the Amanda Knox case is about the Italian Justice system being bad and in need of reform, that’s largely a topic for Italians.
How confident are you in this being the main reason and not other suggested reasons provided in this thread?
I propose that this explanation is orthogonal to the other reasons provided in this thread. In other words, I propose that this explanation holds true whether or not any of the other explanations are also true and that no matter how true any of the other proposed explanations are, it does not diminish the explanatory power of this explanation.
I would say all other proposed explanations are just variations on:
Different things probably come to the forefront through quirks of zeitgeist, personal relevance, effective messaging, attentional resources available at the time, and a dozen other subtle and not-so-subtle factors.
For example, let’s say that when deluks917 says people do do not care very much about the suffering of the powerless that they’ve made an accurate description. That feeds into the attentional price people are willing to pay in my proposed model.
It’s too early in my ruminations of applying this model to “public discourse” or however you want to say system-composed-of-people for me to say how confident I am in it’s applicability. I’m somewhat confident that it explains individual people’s attention at least some large portion of the time.
My question isn’t about the number of people who are up in arms but about understanding the makeup of the modern left.
If my proposed model is true, then the modern left is just a subset of all public discourse and subject to the same attentional economy.
The fact that it gets a lot less attention then other topics in that reference class is what the question is about.
Yeah, I was trying to get to the fact that my answer is possibly more meta than the answer you’re looking for when I joked about me not answering your question with my answer. However, I think my proposed model doesn’t care about reference classes as you seem to be saying. Attention is attention, and everything that would fit in the reference class of injustices against marginalized peoples has to pay it’s attention dollars just as each reference class has to pay.
I would answer that systemic issues are more important then the fate of individual people. To the extend that the Amanda Knox case is about the Italian Justice system being bad and in need of reform, that’s largely a topic for Italians.
Sure. I wasn’t saying that Amanda Knox was or was not as important as the systemic issues. I was saying that the reason Amanda Knox didn’t get more attention is (potentially) the same reason that the mental health issues you’re asking about don’t get more attention. People and systems made of people only have so much attention to go around.
More concretely, if my proposed model is accurate, then one explanation of why this issue is not more central to the modern left is that the transactional costs of entering the left’s zeitgeist have so far not been paid. There’s lots of injustices and the attentional resources are currently spent on other things.
More concretely, if my proposed model is accurate, then one explanation of why this issue is not more central to the modern left is that the transactional costs of entering the left’s zeitgeist have so far not been paid.
Without having a good idea whether the costs are equivalent to ~10,000 dollars in effort or ~100,000,000 dollars I don’t think that explanation contains much information.
There are some issues where it’s very cheap to put them into public attention and others where it isn’t.
If I would ask “Why don’t have have interstellar travel?” answering “Because the costs of developing interstellar travel haven’t been paid” might be a correct answer but at the same time completely useless for understaning the challenges of developing interstallar travel.
If you were to ask which star loves cake the most, and someone responded with an explanation about the differences between inanimate objects and cake-eating entities, that someone didn’t provide the type of answer you were looking for.
Why doesn’t the modern left seem to care so much about patients in mental institutions? Given the resource constraints model I’m pondering: Maybe you’ve misread how prevalent or important the issue is. Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Maybe the modern left has less resources available than you thought.
Thought 2: Actually, it does answer your question
I wouldn’t be surprised if “the transaction costs have not been paid” is the answer.
ChristianKi: “Dustin, how come you didn’t eat lunch out with us today?”
Dustin: “I didn’t have any money in my wallet.”
I think the money-in-wallet answer is a useful, valid, and expected answer. However, there are other answers. Cash flow and accounting. Pay rates for people talking on the internet. Childhood causes of future careers and decision making. Government policies affecting food pricing. However, the proximate cause, and often the most useful answer, is “I didn’t have any money in my wallet.”
Thought 3: It’s not so obvious and that has consequences
The triple constraint model “Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.” is bandied about because it’s not second nature for some (many?) (most?) to keep in mind that there are resources constraints. This is often or usually with concrete physical work in the real world, not some nebulous concept like attentional resources!
I think it’s likely that the idea that there are costs to building physical objects like warp drives is more innate to people than the idea that there are limited funds available to pay for the things we can care about.
An entity that has acknowledged that there are attentional constraints will behave differently from one that has not. Thus, you can gain insight into the entity by observing it’s behavior. For example, if you think patients in mental institutions is salient thing for modern left given what the modern left seems to care about, and the modern left isn’t paying as much attention to it, then perhaps you’ve gained insight into the fact that the modern left needs to learn about attentional resources.
Thought 4: Warp drives
NASA didn’t take the project management triangle to heart during the course of space shuttle development.
By observing this, we learn lessons about the challenges we’ll face during interstellar travel plans.
...
As I said, my answer doesn’t exactly map onto your question, but I think it’s close.
I remember when there was a lot of attention being given to Amanda Knox here on LW. Someone asked a similar question as you...something along the lines of “Why aren’t more people up in arms about this?”
The answer for me at that time was that I have a certain number of Attention Dollars to spend. People are wrongfully imprisoned all over the world every day. New video cards are too expensive. Kids are being tortured. McDonald’s stopped serving salads during the pandemic. There’s all sorts of things to spend my AD’s on.
Attention to causes and injustices costs AD and there is a high transaction cost to switching which injustices are important to me. I hypothesize that the complex system that is the-attention-of-public-discourse suffers from the same. There’s only so much capacity for giving attention to different causes, and switching those causes carries a high price.
That’s not to say Cause X is wrong or less important, only that I (and, hypothetically, public discourse) can only focus on a limited number of things, there’s costs to switching attention, and other things beat Cause X in the race to capture attention.
Different things probably come to the forefront through quirks of zeitgeist, personal relevance, effective messaging, attentional resources available at the time, and a dozen other subtle and not-so-subtle factors.
Of course, this doesn’t really answer your question (and here I am submitting it as an answer)! It only pushes the “why’s” to another level. Why can public discourse only focus on a limited number of things? Why, exactly, is it currently focusing on the things it is? Why are the transaction costs to switching attention high? I suspect that the answers are very complicated and unknown.
There is an economy of public attention. The amount of noise is high, and information asymmetries abound. If you think Cause X is not getting the amount of attention it should then you should work on lowering the information asymmetries and noise level...and recognize that if Cause X gets more attention it’ll mean Cause Y that everyone is currently paying attention to will get less attention. (At least if my model holds.)
Also, you say ”...suggests that a lot of abuse of power is going on.” I think that this conclusion depends a lot on your priors. One type of person is going to see a bad seed when they see this story, another type of person is going to see a corrupt institution. This feeds into this hypothetical economy of public attention.
How confident are you in this being the main reason and not other suggested reasons provided in this thread?
The fact that the story exists and there doesn’t seem to be a follow up and some agency felt it’s responsible for fixing the issue is part of the story.
You can argue that something is a bad apple when the bad apple gets removed by the owner when attention comes to it.
My question isn’t about the number of people who are up in arms but about understanding the makeup of the modern left. In this thread you find people asserting that psychatristic patient are in a similar reference class as child abuse, animal suffering in factory farming and prisoners being mistreated. The fact that it gets a lot less attention then other topics in that reference class is what the question is about.
I would answer that systemic issues are more important then the fate of individual people. To the extend that the Amanda Knox case is about the Italian Justice system being bad and in need of reform, that’s largely a topic for Italians.
I propose that this explanation is orthogonal to the other reasons provided in this thread. In other words, I propose that this explanation holds true whether or not any of the other explanations are also true and that no matter how true any of the other proposed explanations are, it does not diminish the explanatory power of this explanation.
I would say all other proposed explanations are just variations on:
For example, let’s say that when deluks917 says people do do not care very much about the suffering of the powerless that they’ve made an accurate description. That feeds into the attentional price people are willing to pay in my proposed model.
It’s too early in my ruminations of applying this model to “public discourse” or however you want to say system-composed-of-people for me to say how confident I am in it’s applicability. I’m somewhat confident that it explains individual people’s attention at least some large portion of the time.
If my proposed model is true, then the modern left is just a subset of all public discourse and subject to the same attentional economy.
Yeah, I was trying to get to the fact that my answer is possibly more meta than the answer you’re looking for when I joked about me not answering your question with my answer. However, I think my proposed model doesn’t care about reference classes as you seem to be saying. Attention is attention, and everything that would fit in the reference class of injustices against marginalized peoples has to pay it’s attention dollars just as each reference class has to pay.
Sure. I wasn’t saying that Amanda Knox was or was not as important as the systemic issues. I was saying that the reason Amanda Knox didn’t get more attention is (potentially) the same reason that the mental health issues you’re asking about don’t get more attention. People and systems made of people only have so much attention to go around.
More concretely, if my proposed model is accurate, then one explanation of why this issue is not more central to the modern left is that the transactional costs of entering the left’s zeitgeist have so far not been paid. There’s lots of injustices and the attentional resources are currently spent on other things.
Without having a good idea whether the costs are equivalent to ~10,000 dollars in effort or ~100,000,000 dollars I don’t think that explanation contains much information.
There are some issues where it’s very cheap to put them into public attention and others where it isn’t.
If I would ask “Why don’t have have interstellar travel?” answering “Because the costs of developing interstellar travel haven’t been paid” might be a correct answer but at the same time completely useless for understaning the challenges of developing interstallar travel.
Thought 1: Stars don’t love cake
If you were to ask which star loves cake the most, and someone responded with an explanation about the differences between inanimate objects and cake-eating entities, that someone didn’t provide the type of answer you were looking for.
Why doesn’t the modern left seem to care so much about patients in mental institutions? Given the resource constraints model I’m pondering: Maybe you’ve misread how prevalent or important the issue is. Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Maybe the modern left has less resources available than you thought.
Thought 2: Actually, it does answer your question
I wouldn’t be surprised if “the transaction costs have not been paid” is the answer.
ChristianKi: “Dustin, how come you didn’t eat lunch out with us today?”
Dustin: “I didn’t have any money in my wallet.”
I think the money-in-wallet answer is a useful, valid, and expected answer. However, there are other answers. Cash flow and accounting. Pay rates for people talking on the internet. Childhood causes of future careers and decision making. Government policies affecting food pricing. However, the proximate cause, and often the most useful answer, is “I didn’t have any money in my wallet.”
Thought 3: It’s not so obvious and that has consequences
The triple constraint model “Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.” is bandied about because it’s not second nature for some (many?) (most?) to keep in mind that there are resources constraints. This is often or usually with concrete physical work in the real world, not some nebulous concept like attentional resources!
I think it’s likely that the idea that there are costs to building physical objects like warp drives is more innate to people than the idea that there are limited funds available to pay for the things we can care about.
An entity that has acknowledged that there are attentional constraints will behave differently from one that has not. Thus, you can gain insight into the entity by observing it’s behavior. For example, if you think patients in mental institutions is salient thing for modern left given what the modern left seems to care about, and the modern left isn’t paying as much attention to it, then perhaps you’ve gained insight into the fact that the modern left needs to learn about attentional resources.
Thought 4: Warp drives
NASA didn’t take the project management triangle to heart during the course of space shuttle development.
By observing this, we learn lessons about the challenges we’ll face during interstellar travel plans.
...
As I said, my answer doesn’t exactly map onto your question, but I think it’s close.