Semi-attached Attention

What can you do if you need to convince someone of something but you don’t have proper evidence? One simple way is to demonstrate something else to be true and then just pretend it’s the same thing.

In statistics, this trick is known as the ‘semi-attached figure’.

Simply pick a couple of things that sound kind of the same – though they aren’t (this is the important point) – and make a comparison between them to validate your conclusion.

An everyday example would be the number of reports that contrast hours spent TV viewing with hours spent on the internet, as though those activities were the same thing. There are a million and one things one could be doing on the internet versus pretty much one thing when watching TV.

One reputable market research firm recently tried to convince an audience I was in of the popularity of a particular on-demand TV channel.

‘Who is watching?’?they asked.?‘Well, 90% of viewers are aware of the service!”.

Sounds impressive; however, awareness of the existence of something is not the same as the usage of it. It has long been a common tactic of persuasion to cite information that initially seems to uphold an assertion but upon closer inspection is pretty much irrelevant to the actual claim.

This means stating one thing as proof for something else.

For example, if some report you read claims that ‘85% of CEOs think that AI will change the way their organisations do marketing by 2025”– what does that actually prove?

This implies that CEOs are some sort of authority on the application of AI technology.

Or marketing.

Imagine getting pitched by a security firm that claims there are a thousand times more cyber-attacks in 2023 than there were in 2005. This might even be kinda true. But the ability to detect cyber-attacks is also exponentially better than it was 18 years ago, so it’s entirely likely that more should be found.

There’s no shortage of reports showing the decline in advertising spend in printed news.

The implication is that advertisers should spend more on whatever the alternative is that’s being sold. Of course, the decline in advertising spend does not necessarily mean a decline in readership (although that is also probably true).

When dealing with any ‘evidence’ of this nature, ask yourself how the evidence specifically proves the claim and not something else purporting to be the claim.

Could there be alternative explanations that would make the claim false?

If the evidence isn’t necessarily relevant to the conclusion, then you are probably dealing with a semi-attached figure.

(Gibson's Law states that for every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD. So, anyone can find a subject-matter expert who supports their view because having a PhD doesn’t necessarily make someone right; it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.)

Anyway, with that in mind, I've tried to condense my main scepticism towards some aspects of attention metrics into a chunk as short as possible, so here goes.

It’s another situation in which the claim cannot be proven, so the perpetrator pulls the old bait-and-switch, proves something else instead, and then pretends it is the same thing.

The tools of attention metrics; eye-tracking, gaze duration and STAS, quite possibly prove something.

But it’s nothing to do with attention. The tech measures something else, but they just pretend it’s the same thing.

Once you start off with that faulty premise, then you are free to go anywhere else you like and then just make up other ‘rules’ like 2.5 seconds of viewing results in memory 'encoding', which is just nonsense.

Memory is not like a video recording or storing files on a hard disc. Instead, when we remember something, our brain reconstructs the event fresh each time, stitching together fragments of information. It's more like ye olde BitTorrent in that respect.

Trust me; there is zero evidence out there linking eye gaze to predict attention or this so-called memory ‘encoding’.?I’ve talked to a number of neuroscience and psychology people, and they all agree it's over-simplified, conflation and verging on the BS. (No wonder some media agency types are grabbing it with both hands...)

In any case, memory?systems in humans and other animals have?evolved?to help retain survival and?fitness-related?information - geared toward helping an?organism?enhance its?reproductive?fitness and avoid threats. What is being looked at is a far greater predictor of attention than the looking, itself.

Attention happens in the mind and serves adaptive goals. Without addressing that, the attention metrics lobby is nowhere.