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.