Too Much Knowledge: an essay on knowledge and attention

I published an essay on knowledge and attention on Habr and also added it to my library.

Brief summary

In this essay, I argue that:

• people don’t “transfer knowledge” — they integrate fragments into their personal worldviews,

• integration is limited by attention, which is finite and expendable,

• classic text structure (title → blurb → table of contents → preface → main text) is a mechanism for saving attention,

• modern platforms already measure attention investment implicitly through behavior,

• LLMs let us work consciously with narrative density (summaries, embeddings),

• embeddings can be used as a universal “fingerprint” of meaning,

• summing embeddings of texts a person has read yields a dynamic profile of their interests,

• and this opens a path to new personalization and collective thinking built on partial overlaps between worldviews.

If you’re interested, you can discuss these points with me privately.