2026-02-07
mostly written by 2025-08-23, minor update 2026-02-07
Attention beats capital
Disclaimer
Collecting pointers to a few different mental models I have around the same cluster of topics.
- What do people want or need? Maslow's hierarchy: food, sex, physical safety; love, self-esteem, belonging; self-actualisation. Obtaining food requires capital. Satisfying most other needs requires attention from other people.
- People also want knowledge/wisdom. Most of the time, this is instrumentally useful for one of the wants/needs listed above. Sometimes, it is part of self-actualisation - curiosity for its own sake.
- A lot of consumer purchases are done to get attention of other people (such as group belongingness, sex, etc), people commonly trade away their excess capital for attention. In today's society, most people have enough to eat but most people are starved of attention.
- Evolution has wired human brains with lots of reward for fulfilling short-term goals, and little reward for fulfilling long-term goals. Ability to delay gratification is one of the best predictors of one's ability to complete long-term goals.
- How to build power in society? Acquire capital or attention at scale, as other people need them to satisfy their basic needs. Billionaires wield capital, politicians wield attention. Ensure it is "rivalrous" in the economic sense - if you have lots of attention or capital, don't give it away for free but obtain something in return.
- Making software and making content (videos/books/games) share similar principles.
- Paul Graham: Make something (software) people want, make something they want enough that they spontaneously tell their friends about it. Get feedback from users, and improve something each time. Prioritise users you can get more feedback from, the ideal user is yourself or someone you know well. Don't think too much about figuring out the optimal way to acquire capital. Only large companies can risk losing user's attention in order to acquire more capital, and most of them eventually die out too.
- MrBeast: Make content good enough for your audience, dont blame the "algorithm". Make 100 videos and improve something each time. MrBeast had a 24x7 video call giving him constant feedback on every video. MrBeast re-invests all his capital into acquiring more attention, he doesn't care to preserve capital.
- A lot of tech companies enable people to make better trades than they could have otherwise, for instance by finding them a partner/broker/driver/grocery store/etc that is better or cheaper or faster than they could have found without the internet.
- (But remember, many of these trades are done in society today in the hope of getting attention not capital. If a person buys better clothing or rents a better apartment using the internet, it is often to get attention from others.)
- Attention on the internet is power-law distributed, a handful of people have almost all of Earth's attention by catering to mass audience. A larger set of people acquire attention by catering to niche audiences. This includes both content creators and tech companies.
- Political power is power-law distributed due to nuclear weapons centralising power, a handful of people have almost all of Earth's political power.
- Politicians create "common knowledge" of what a society wants, and execute it. People on the internet with lots of attention can do exactly the same. Many youtubers are influencing national politics and geopolitics. I expect we will soon have youtubers running for govt in various countries.
- Ages of youngest self-made billionaires are steadily reducing due to the internet. SBF was 29, Vitalik was 27, MrBeast was 26, when they first became billionaires. (update: 2026-02-07 - Mercor founders were 22.)
- When people prioritise a life partner who has capital, they usually want this as this is a signal their partner has earned attention from other people, rather than because they want to purchase things with it. Even if they do purchase things, that may again be to earn attention from other people.
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