Down the Rabbit Hole

It is common, in my circles, to speak of “going down the rabbit hole.” Writers, of course, are notorious for starting to research some minor point and emerging hours later having chased down one idea only to find another sort-of-related point that must also be investigated and so on.

My partner, who only writes when he has to, does the same thing just for the hell of it – and then bemoans the fact that he stayed up too late chasing down ideas on his screen. He complains he spends too much time staring at a screen, but of course what he’s doing there is reading something interesting that leads to something else interesting, which I don’t think is the real problem with too much screen time.

I mean, people like me and my partner and most of the writers I know would be doing the same thing without the internet. We’d just be doing it with dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, various other books around the house and – once we’d exhausted those sources – the nearest library.

Going down rabbit holes is part of what makes life worth living.

Funny, though, when I looked the phrase up online – to determine if, in fact, it does come from Alice in Wonderland (it apparently does) – I saw a few comments that implied that it’s not a positive thing.

For example, the Wikipedia entry says:

It has come to mean that someone has become interested in something, usually by accident; and often the subject does not deserve the amount of attention that a person gives.

I say “bah.”

The reason I am writing about this is because I read a piece in The New York Times by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff entitled “We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask.” (gift link). In this essay, which among other things critiques the use of so-called AI, she observes:

Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting.

That resonated with me deeply. I love undirected exploration. I’m very inefficient at research. And more than anything else, I love connecting things from very different points of view, things that might not seem connected to anyone else.

Dr. Le Cunff went on to explain why jumping to the answer using “AI” can cause some real problems:

Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints. The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own.

Reading her essay sent me down various rabbit holes. I looked up the author’s book – Tiny Experiments – decided it looked interesting but that maybe I would only want to browse it, and put it on hold at the library. (It will likely be available in a month or so and send me back to this rabbit hole and maybe after I read it I’ll decide I need my own permanent copy.)

I also looked at other work the author is doing, including a newsletter and online classes.

And then I looked up going down rabbit holes and got to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry and a couple of other explanations that were even more negative, so I didn’t bother with them further.

In the modern world, with its overemphasis on productivity, inefficiency is considered a vice. But in my old age, I have learned to embrace it.

I am inefficient in running errands, which means I do a lot more walking. While it’s possible to go to the grocery store and the drug store at the same time, doing them at different times means I get a lot more exercise.

Being intellectually inefficient is just as useful, in the long run. You come upon an idea, you dig a bit, maybe you make a note about it, maybe you forget about it.

And then something else you find makes you remember it and maybe you even put those ideas together.

If you go down the rabbit hole, and keep following the things that pique your interest, you will often come upon something you never considered before – and that something might solve a hole in your story or your project.

Or even your life.