There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
Tristan HarrisRead
We continue to have this illusion that things outside of us aren't driving what we think and believe, when in fact so much of what we spend our attention on is driven by decisions of thousands of engineers and product designers.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our thoughts and beliefs are significantly influenced by external forces, particularly from designers and engineers.
This quote highlights the misconception that our ideas and beliefs are solely our own, emphasizing that much of our attention and perceptions are shaped by the technological products and decisions made by engineers and product designers. It suggests that we often fail to recognize the impact of external influences on our internal thought processes, indicating that technology plays a critical role in guiding human behavior and beliefs.
Themes
InfluenceTechnologyBeliefsDesignAttention
In practice
Example use cases
In a presentation about social media, you could use this quote to discuss the impact of external influences on user behavior.
More from Tristan Harris
All quotes βTechnology steers what 2 billion people are thinking and believing every day. It's possibly the largest source of influence over 2 billion people's thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don't have that much influence over people's daily thoughts.
Tristan HarrisRead
You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out.
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Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.
Tristan HarrisRead
I'm an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That's why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people's minds from getting hijacked.
Tristan HarrisRead
If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
Tristan HarrisRead
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