If We Had But World Enough and Time

From time to time I am asked to interview prospective hires at the law firm where I am employed. This is usually depressing because the interviewees are young and bright and interesting, and they would generally be happier and more productive doing something other than practicing law. But you've got to feed the monkey.

Anyway in one particularly depressing interview, the interviewee explained the biscuit conditional to me. The biscuit conditional is a linguistic concept illustrated by the following Demetri Martin joke (which I am paraphrasing):

I went to shop for clothes and the woman in the store said, "If you need anything my name is Kim." This startled me because I had never met anyone with a conditional identity before.

The point of the biscuit conditional is that an "if" statement sometimes pertains to the relevance of the information, not the information itself. The traditional example is: "If you're hungry there's a biscuit on the table." Of course there's a biscuit whether or not you are hungry, but the information is only relevant to you if you're hungry. Similarly Demetri Martin only needed to know Kim's name if he needed to ask for help.

Anyway my point today is that biscuit conditionals are a kind of exception that proves the rule, the rule being that statements contain an implicit "and this information is relevant to you" appended to them. To put this another way, at any point you can choose to pay attention to any of the nearly infinitely many streams of information available to you. Each of them demands a certain amount of your attention, and you can't conceivably pay attention to all of them. Of course in some circumstances you are cut off from most of them, e.g. your phone dies in the middle of an intercity train ride and you are left with only a single magazine to read. But this example is revealing precisely because it is unusual—in our ordinary circumstances we face no such scarcity and instead it is attention that is scarce.

So how do we allocate attention? I'll write some more posts about it, but in short I think we do it haphazardly or driven by a desire for entertainment or comfort. A few quick implications:

• This is the reason that propaganda needs to entertain us. Fox News and Donald Trump are very good at this. You also see this on Twitter where ridiculous arguments couched in humorous terms often go viral.
• Because attention is so scarce it is often sufficient for an idea to be superficially plausible or attractive. Few people have the attention spans to delve deeper. (Again, this is clearly visible in propaganda and viral tweets.)
• It is unreasonable to go through life without consciously allocating attention, and yet this is how most of us behave in our personal lives. (Professionally there are usually few opportunities to pay attention to random things rather than the task that's been assigned.) Of course allocating attention well may be a very hard problem, but simply going with the flow is almost certainly worse and exposes people to many of the well-known hazards of modern life (polarization, in-group thinking, manipulation by advertisers, and so forth).

I think the right way to go through life (one that I seldom practice, admittedly) is to consciously ask, "Is this worth my time?" before committing any serious amount of attention to a subject. Moreover, I think it's important to maintain a kind of awareness of uncertainty for most things. It's okay to form a provisional opinion based on very limited information (e.g. the FDA says pasteurization is good, so I'll provisionally take the view that milk should be pasteurized), but it's also important to remember the degree of confidence that you attach to your beliefs and to behave accordingly.

Twitter is terrible for all of this. I've been thinking about how to use Twitter responsibly and I am not sure it can be done. More on that later.