I think we are going to find that attention is dominated by working set memory, and people who can juggle even twice as much stuff are going to operate fundamentally differently than those who can’t afford or won’t have the surgery. And past 5x it may become difficult to even communicate, much less compete.
rs17070145 in KIBRA/WWC1
Also, this was done with very low-resolution genotyping. Even if it's a genuine association, rs17070145 is probably not the causal variant, just something which is in linkage disequilibrium with it.
I would be careful equivocating working memory, attention and processing power. Attention is much more complicated than what one can juggle in mind actively, what is chosen to enter and leave it also matters, just as the shape and form of the task it conforms to. There is no singular unit in brain that “creates” attention, it is best thought as an emergent property of several, if not all, parts working together.
Besides that, even if we assumed a von Neumann architecture for human cognition, an increase in memory wouldn’t have expanded total processing capacity unless it was starved of it. I don’t think that is the case for humans, if there was a selective advantage to having more working memory as general problem solvers, we would have had it already. Granted, the types of tasks we undertake today can be different in shape, but not completely; still need to survive a physical world, still need to have successful relationships, still have to manage emotions, still have to do all of these while doing our specialized abstract cognitive tasks.
Although your argument of "if it brought such an advantage, we should have evolved into it by now" does hold water too. I suppose it hinges on how much of an evolutionary advantage we actually have from excelling in the kind of deep abstract thinking that some jobs require nowadays, vs. how much this improvement would've been worth in past centuries.
There are clear reproductive advantages to distraction. If your actions prioritize your own wellbeing (or the furthering of some cognitive task) over the instincts to eat, reproduce, and protect your children, your genetics will be at a disadvantage.
Once I get into a deep work state, the ability to hold and reason about more of the problem would definitely be helpful.
This dependence on short-term memory is why I find Rust's borrow checker intolerable during exploratory programming. Whatever coding bugs it prevents have to be strongly outnumbered by design errors it causes by stealing attention from the most critical activity at that time.
The borrow checker would deliver 100% of its value if it limited its enforcement to release builds, and just reported numbers otherwise.
Removing agency from users of your program or programming language is not a recipe for success.
I don't agree with you on this issue or your "recipe for success". The reply was fine.
You have introduced yourself, and I promise to remember.
The easiest way to "get around the borrow checker" is not to use Rust at all. We have evidence of people using it, so they are proof positive that not everyone will "just take that route".
If you meant not everyone, but some people, then yes, we know there are people releasing programs not coded in Rust, many quite successfully.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Vernon%20Vinge+A%20Deepness%20in%2...
With such advanced devices hand-held already, why would we even need to interface with the human mind? If we're at the point of human-computer interface, which is probably 100+ years away, we will already be beholden to 100 more years of innovation in mobile devices, which is hyper-charged by capitalism already.
Think back to 2000: Very few people could have imagined the vast implications of these simple hand-held devices. It's much easier to make a hand-held, rectangular, "multi-tool" computer, based on existing tech, than creating a new class of technology to interface with neurons and store biological data.
Now, these simple "phones" have destroyed entire industries, created entirely new ones, allowed the scaling up of all kinds of mis and disinformation, and allowed the capture of human attention on a massive scale.
How many people in the rich world do not have a phone? How many poor people are trying to get one? How many times per day do people check their phone? How long do they use it?
We have all enrolled in a massive psychological experiment, something evolution or society as we built it never had to contend with. The "singularity" is coming and our devices are opening the door to it day by day.
I think part of the problem is that almost all software is designed to be usable without training/learning, so almost all task management tools get reduced to lists - which are inefficient.
We need a tool that retrains our brains to generate units of work that, aside from a line of descriptive text, also contain: NPV, value-over-time, hierarchical dependencies, resource allocation, location dependence, etc... ...and then have a simple piece of software prioritize based on calculated optimized order of action.
A PIM application ecosystem with a storage and RPC system like Newton soups (but updated to Internet security paranoia), stored in an open, highly-parseable format like Emacs Org Mode, with the enormous tweakability and context-sensitivity of DateBk6, combined with the dynamism of LifeBalance, would be very interesting.