{"id":95,"date":"2025-09-15T12:34:38","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T04:34:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2025-09-25T13:22:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T05:22:45","slug":"the-physics-of-attention-asymmetry-and-negative-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/09\/15\/the-physics-of-attention-asymmetry-and-negative-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"The Physics of Attention: Asymmetry and Negative Attention"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I spent the last two years driving a large, multi-year moonshot project at LinkedIn\u2014called 360Brew [<a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2501.16450\">paper<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/presentation\/d\/16it9UfGCMqA8mzewYhkI1nv-wj6dLJken21eyW8CYEQ\">talk<\/a>]. It aimed to revolutionize ranking and recommendations across the company and give LinkedIn an edge. (In a separate post, I\u2019ll write about the challenges of running a moonshot initiative.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As the initiative grew from exploration to a company-wide top priority, my responsibilities expanded: many teams, many reviews with executives, and\u2014inevitably\u2014many trade-offs. As the DRI, I made calls that pushed some work to the top, removed some from the roadmap entirely, made tough hiring decisions, and allocated resources. That\u2019s the job: prioritize, say no, and manage resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This, of course, made some people unhappy. As a leader I follow three principles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Put people first.<\/strong> Take care of people by connecting them with the right opportunities.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Enter discussions without a fixed opinion.<\/strong> Seek the best outcome for the project, the people, and the company.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Be transparent.<\/strong> Make sure everyone understands the reasons behind each decision\u2014even if they don\u2019t agree.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>For a while, the discussion stayed inside docs, reviews, and rooms. But as the project grew into a top company initiative, the dynamics changed. One day someone showed me a Blind thread about 360Brew, full of disinformation. It was strange to see the conversation move to Blind and distort reality. Over time, the focus shifted from the project to me and other leads. The tone sharpened. Anonymous handles stated rumors as facts and projected project\u2019s rough edges became \u201cproof\u201d of bad faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At first, the personal attacks stung. I had asked people to raise concerns in meetings or 1:1s, so seeing them turn to Blind felt odd. What hurt most was how little it matched real life. People shipped. People learned new skills. Some earned promotions and bonuses. A few took what they built with us and landed great roles elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Asymmetry and negative attention<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Reading Chris Hayes\u2019s <em>The Sirens\u2019 Call<\/em> helped me name what was happening. He describes <strong>Asymmetry in attention and negative attention<\/strong> <strong>in modern life<\/strong>\u2014and it has two sides:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>For attention givers:<\/strong> For most of history, attention was symmetric and one-to-one within a small community of family and friends. In a project that directly involves ~50 people and indirectly touches 200\u2013300, I can\u2019t attend to everyone and every detail as much as others can focus on me and my decisions. This <strong>asymmetry of attention<\/strong> can push some people to use other channels to project their attention onto me and other leads.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>For attention takers:<\/strong> For most of history, our \u201caudience\u201d was a few dozen people. Our social wiring hasn\u2019t caught up to the reality that, online, the audience is everyone. So when anonymous posters\u2014dunk on you, your brain still reads it as if your friends and family are turning on you.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>That asymmetry explains the mismatch between what\u2019s true on the ground and what trends in a thread. It was the root cause of what I felt so acutely\u2014and of why others sought other outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What I learned (and keep learning)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Leadership doesn\u2019t grant immunity from being misunderstood. It guarantees it. The decisions that create focus\u2014choosing a path, saying no, changing a plan\u2014also create friction. Most of that friction is healthy: debate, pushback, better designs. Some of it spills into places that often lack a constructive goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few practical shifts helped me regain my footing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Culture of transparency and open discussion.<\/strong> I doubled down on transparency and made sure anyone who wanted to understand had a venue to do so. We kept documents open access with clear explanations of actions taken and planned\u2014the \u201cwhy\u201d was already documented. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Kindness with boundaries.<\/strong> When a criticism was fair, I absorbed it. When it was false, I named it and moved on.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Thick skin \u2260 a hard heart.<\/strong> The goal isn\u2019t to stop feeling; it\u2019s to feel the signal (what\u2019s useful) without letting the noise (what\u2019s performative) steer the ship.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent the last two years driving a large, multi-year moonshot project at LinkedIn\u2014called 360Brew [paper, talk]. It aimed to revolutionize ranking and recommendations across the company and give LinkedIn an edge. (In a separate post, I\u2019ll write about the challenges of running a moonshot initiative.) As the initiative grew from exploration to a company-wide &#8230; <a title=\"The Physics of Attention: Asymmetry and Negative Attention\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/09\/15\/the-physics-of-attention-asymmetry-and-negative-attention\/\" aria-label=\"More on The Physics of Attention: Asymmetry and Negative Attention\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,10,11,14,19],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-attention","tag-books","tag-leadership","tag-personal-growth","tag-transparency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firooz.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}