Imagine eleven people each have a message that they think should get 10% of a group’s attention. They aren’t being crazy selfish and attention-seeking—just on average a little over-emphasizing the importance of their own information. So adding up all the message importances as rated by their owners, it gets to a little over one.
Now the people get to share their message with some meta-information about its importance—for instance, they can say it more or less loudly.
What happens?
Lets say they all say it at a loudness that corresponds to ‘should get 10% of the attention’. The listeners then divide their attention between the messages, and each one gets 9% of the attention.
The speakers realize they spoke a bit too quietly for the importance of their message, and turn up the volume.
But the next time, they find that the ambient volume has increased, and their new volume again only gets them 9% of the attention. So they increase it again.
Eventually, everyone is shouting as loud as they can, just to get what seems like a rightful look in.
I see this pattern in lots of places. Too many emails titled ‘Important’, too many paragraphs beginning ‘One key thing to remember...’. Loudspeakers trying to breach travelers’ headphones with important advisories. Todo lists forever longer than you can possibly do, and marked with things like ‘NO REALLY DO THIS ONE’… Warning labels and ‘open this immediately’ signs. Perhaps even the length of writing: an author emphasizes with length what they think will be ignored, but then other stuff will be ignored, so they emphasize those too, not coming to terms with limited attention of reader. The proliferation of objects that should be findable. Literal speaking in crowds.
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A version I find at job is being told that every project is a #1 priority. And a regular weekly meeting (separately for each project) to remind you of that.
in general, this dynamic occurs when participants are able to make a claim on some scarce resource without paying the cost. then, normal supply/demand causes the resource to become massively oversubscribed.
two examples, on top of the ones from the essay:
anything where people complain about “scalpers”: concert tickets, pokemon cards, game consoles.
the proverbial commons: it’s cheap (profitable, even!) to raise a sheep. but raising a sheep is an implicit claim on productive grazing lands next year. the lands become oversubscribed.
the fix is to internalize the costs. sometimes this happens automatically (long lines for console releases), other times it may need to be coordinated (pay a georgist tax to graze).
i would love a way to do this for todo lists. my first idea is to have a hard cap on the number of items in the list, so that before adding one, you must complete or delete another. but this undercuts part of the value of a todo list, which is that ideas may occur in moments where work is impossible.
perhaps this can be overcome in the following way: allow the list to grow, but at the beginning of each month, a threshold is imposed. until the list is, at some point, under that threshold, new items cannot be added.
it occurs to me that the “bullet journaling” approach has a bit of this. the list must be copied anew each day, which forces some cost in time and effort to maintain a long list.