Philosophy Prof at University of Oslo. Writes all things attention - from psychology to politics and back. Author of "Structuring Mind" (OUP). PI of GoodAttention. He/His
https://www.sebastianwatzl.com/
Sebastian Watzl
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"We could change that such that people would be more facially politically neutral or have a more right wing slant...But most work would still be bad, and that's the real problem here."
most sensible thing I've read on this topic in quite some time
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...
Seems to be an important ruling, especially in light of Google's new ideas about 'search'.
My concern is what should be a stopgap solution for problems that need a long term whole society approach ends up being the only serious attention paid to the issue. A band-aid on a festering sore.
Just to be clear, social media ‘bans’, age verification, ‘device-level’ control over sexual images etc. all *increase* the power of the tech giants and the tech bros. They hand over enforcement and monitoring to the tech giants. They all give more data and more control to the tech giants.
My team has been studying visual propaganda within online images and videos. This post by WA state GOP leader, Jim Walsh, illustrates a few of the tactics that we've been documenting: strategic ambiguity, implicit framing, and controversy baiting: open.substack.com/pub/katestar...
In "Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI," @cyberlyra.bsky.social, Ben Shestakofsky, Alex Taylor, and I are particularly keen to understand how the project of AI involves numerous "decoys" that misdirect critics' attention, undermining efforts to hold AI to account. arxiv.org/abs/2604.16106
This is magnificently cool and valuable work by Cara Ocobock. Why we should seriously consider that pregnancy physiology provides the original human endurance adaptations. (Then, later, bipedalism plus endurance physiology allowed endurance running.)
There is an ironic twist to this story: Haidt's influence on public attention and opinion formation illustrates almost perfectly one of the biggest real problems of the attention economy.
Yup.
Interesting discussion of whether attention spans are decreasing. I have trouble with one argument, though: that lab tasks are necessarily a good measure of real-world attention. They are surely less messy, but they may not actually reflect real life www.nature.com/articles/d41...
