Theory Thursday: Spending Your Attention of Something Better than This Article

Yes, I'm a little late on this one, I know. Humor me. But I stumbled across this article and wanted to talk about how it how it relates back my GRAND MASTER PLAN!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-shutting-down-1.4645324

So Cambridge Analytica is closing its does. Cambridge Analytica is the organization behind Facebook's most recent privacy fiasco (as of the time of the this writing, which is no guarantee that their planned Dating App won't have generated something new by the time this is published). The smug voice of legion that is the Internet has given itself muscle strain patting itself on the back as it points out the obvious about a free service supported by ads. Which is that if you aren't paying for the service, then you are probably the product being sold and the customer.

But despite our pop culture collective intelligence being very aware of the fact that Facebook was selling us and not selling to us, a great many people seemed entirely unaware of this fact.

The Mendasa Freepath uses the Song of Seven as its core guide for behavior. The Third Song of the Song of Seven: Be Adult, has as its first verse the command to think critically. This is sometimes articulated with the admonishment to speak out.

Now, back to Facebook and the surprise some people have at how Facebook treats its users. The pop culture mind collective knew that Facebook was selling us to advertisers, and knew that Facebook in no way valued those non-paying customers over the paying (real) customers: the advertisers. The the group mind knew this from more than a few clues. There are plenty of techniques which one can use to assess the logic of an argument, or the value of a deal, or the trustworthiness of a person (or tech company) offering a deal that's too good to be true.

But before you can use any of that, critical thinking of any sort requires a sacrifice be made before it works. You must make a sacrifice of attention, you must devote you attention to a task before you can think critically about it. Paying attention is critical to any thinking worth doing. The explanation of why Facebook put its advertisers ahead of its non-paying users isn't hard to explain, the advertisers pay and the non-paying customers don't pay. Most people who were surprised by the lack of respect they received from Facebook, wouldn't have been surprised had they directed their own attention at the workings of Facebook's business model on their own. They would have realized very quickly that they were the product being sold and not the customer. But first, they would have had to direct their attention.

Attention is a finite resource. The willpower required to think in a concerted way is a finite resource. Decision fatigue is a real thing. So what you choose to direct your attention towards is a decision to spend some of your resources. And what you choose to think about is another decision to spend some of your resources. And this is to say nothing about the time required to do the thinking and to direct the attention. So we all have to pick and choose, prioritize, those things upon which we will spend our attention and our willpower.

The Critical Thinking skills which are baked into the Mendasa Freepath are quite varied: the three questions, the five levels of certain, the first question, the basic tools of the scientific method, and a learneable collection of logical fallacies (among others). But it all begins with directing attention towards a topic.

Your attention is a psychic spotlight, and your mind can only see (and thus think about) what's in the spotlight.

Current Project: The Song of Seven

I am listing this as the current project. The future project would more accurately describe the project however. I have realized that writing 3781 words per day, a writer could write a novel of 1.38 million words in length in a single year. This would beat the current Guinness World Record of the the longest novel, currently held by Marcel Proust's 'À la recherche du temps perdu.'

The resulting novel's word count would also be 1/1000th the age of the known universe in years. To do this, a novelist would need to write roughly 4000 words per day. Anthony Trollope wrote 3000 per day, and did so consistently through his whole life. Many writers of the Victorian era, such as Charles Dickens, wrote enormous masterpieces such as 'Bleak House' in a serialized fashion in Newspapers. This serialized method forced the authors to write the story in real time, leaving them unable to go back and edit or rework.

To perform such a feat in a serial fashion, the author would need to plan out their plot and their structure well in advance. The following is especially true if the author plans (as I do) to use multiple interweaving plots to tell a story that transcends any one plot.

So that is my plan. I will write a novel that will break the Guinness World Record for the longest novel (somebody other than the author must also have published the work, but that can be addressed later).  I will write this novel in 2000 word installments, twice per day. I will post the progress as I write it, serializing it as Charles Dickens serialized 'Bleak House'. I also release the whole work into the public domain.

I am planning my project now. I am not ready to begin writing. I do not know whether I can do this. But whether I succeed or fail, the attempt should prove magnificent.