My daughter didn’t even dance, she just wandered around the stage, looking at the audience with eyes as wide as a two-year old’s eyes starting at a bunch of strangers. It didn’t matter that she didn’t dance, I was so proud. I took photos, and video, with my phone.
And, just in case, I checked my email. Twitter. You never know.
..
- New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
- The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.
With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive.
So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine.
Against Transparency
In the context of the then-frenzied demand for financial reform, Brandeis called for “publicity”–the idea that “bankers when issuing securities … make public the commissions or profits they are receiving.”
This publicity was designed to serve two very different purposes. First, Brandeis thought that the numbers would shame bankers into offering terms that were more reasonable–a strategy that has been tried with executive compensation by the SEC, with the result not of shame, but jealousy, leading to even higher pay. Second, and more significantly, Brandeis believed that publicity would make the market function more efficiently.
But in 2000, first lady Hillary Clinton read an op-ed piece in The New York Times detailing the harm that the bill would do to lower-middle-class Americans. She began referring to “that awful bill”–lower case “b”–and took on the mission of stopping her husband from making it law. He apparently acquiesced, letting the bill die in a pocket veto.
Two years later, First Lady Clinton was Senator Clinton. And two years later, she had received over $140,000 in campaign contributions from credit-card and financial-services companies. Two years later, the bill came up for a vote. But by now Senator Clinton apparently saw things differently from how First Lady Clinton had seen them. In 2001, she voted for “that awful bill” twice. (In 2005, she switched her position again, opposing its final passage.)
.. This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required.
.. Once we have named it, you will begin to see the attention-span problem everywhere, in public and private life.
.. Any effort to protect the accused against unjustified criticism was abandoned. Unfair complaints would have to be tolerated–as they would have to be in any similar context. The age of transparency is upon us. The need to protect the whistleblower is unquestionable–driving off even modest efforts to cushion the blows from a mistaken accusation.