Right, the attention is only valuable as a way to get to your money. If we somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases, it would seem to be better[0] to just pay with the same amount of money. That would free up a bunch of attention that was being destroyed to redirect the flow of money. That attention could be used to do self-directed research into products and services that you might value ("pull advertising"). On net, this would be far less predatory and more pleasant.
Of course, we can't somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases involved. Pretending we can leads to ludicrous conclusions like mine here: obviously the world is never actually going to work in this way. I think the closest we might get would be to clean up certain types of predatory advertising, maybe starting with anything aimed at young children. Which is of course what most of the world has been trying (and, to a limited extent, succeeding at) for decades.
[0]- There is a credible argument here that the advertising model allows people with more money to subsidize people with less money, but since we have a magic bias-removal wand in this hypothetical, it's still more efficient to just do that directly.
Of course, we can't somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases involved. Pretending we can leads to ludicrous conclusions like mine here: obviously the world is never actually going to work in this way. I think the closest we might get would be to clean up certain types of predatory advertising, maybe starting with anything aimed at young children. Which is of course what most of the world has been trying (and, to a limited extent, succeeding at) for decades.
[0]- There is a credible argument here that the advertising model allows people with more money to subsidize people with less money, but since we have a magic bias-removal wand in this hypothetical, it's still more efficient to just do that directly.