[geeksinthewoods]

Ya. It seems like evolution itself has been running a sparsity experiment for millions of years. Sparse attention may be the universal price of survival: efficiency over imagination, precision over possibility.

The line about "missing insights being rare, deferred, and distributed" is like the hardest to notice in practice: optimization wins are loud (speed, cost, scores). Meanwhile the things we prune are often counterfactual ideas that never form, weird bridges that never get built, questions that never feel worth asking because our router did not surface them.

One thing I'm still unsure about (and would love to think about more) is how direct the analogy should be. In models, sparsity is engineered / learned under explicit objectives. In biology and culture it's much more emergent and multi-objective.