Comment by sstrudeau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sstrudeau | Hacker News Reader

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I had an interesting debate with some friends after sharing this Tom Waits quote: "This is what's wrong with the world. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."

Via http://www.bnox.be/2009/11/tom-waits-and-deficit-of-wonder.h...

I tend to agree that there can be some value in the gap between wondering about something and actually finding out (or never finding out). Letting your mind chew on a question means you have an opportunity to imagine your own answer or your own story. When you tighten that gap those creative mental wonderings get clipped short.

I don't think he is saying a world where you can never look things up in 5 seconds is preferrable, but noting the effect this has on the underappreciated benefits of wonder.

I prefer Eliezer Yudkowsky's take on it,

Ignorance should not be celebrated in the first place; I've made this point before. It is a corruption of curiosity to prefer the question to its answer. Yet people seem to get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something. Worse, they think that the mysteriousness of a mysterious phenomena indicates a special quality of the phenomenon itself, inferring that it is surely different-in-kind from phenomena labeled "understood". If we are ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about our state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_...

Eliezer is commenting on the perpetual state of ignorance, not initial ignorance followed by pursuit and locating of an answer.

The paragraph I quoted was more about valuing wonder for its own sake - I thought he had an essay explicitly about that, but none of the ones I found seemed to hit that note as well as that paragraph.

Ahh yes, but wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure unavailable in times past.

Not when that thing nobody knows is how to compile that damn library in your specific environment :(

But when I finally figure it out, I get the elation of knowing a tiny thing that no one else knows... and then going and posting it on stackoverflow.

>wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure

What is not rare (sadly) is finding out that nobody else knows only after wading through 100s of web pages by people who think they know but do not.

>wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure

What is not rare is finding out that nobody else knows only after wading through 100s of web pages by people who think they know but do not.

I'm not sure I quite agree. Any time I read anything about space, black holes, relativity etc. (which is way outside my field, I'm a programmer) I get that same sense of wonder. It's not gone, it's just that we don't have to wonder about the little stuff anymore. :-)

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