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. :-)

> things like having to look in the dictionary to learn about things and words

Do you think that using a print dictionary builds character better than using Onelook.com?

19,089,129 words in 1062 dictionaries indexed: http://www.onelook.com/?d=all_gen

The dictionary offered two things:

1) I'd find lots of other cool words as I searched for the one I wanted

2) I had to work to get the answer. Sure, it wasn't a LOT of work, but I had to invest something to get something. Searching a word online requires practically no investment.

Which is not to say I don't use online dictionaries, Wikipedia, Google "define:", etc.

1) Accidental discovery is a major virtue of the internet.

2) But you didn't have to walk fifteen miles to a small library to do it. The generation you grew up in had a major barrier to entry removed, but the effort and time was shifted elsewhere. The same thing is happening to this generation.

Perhaps sliverstorm was talking about availability of information. Growing up in the 1970's, there was only the public library, 2 TV channels, and 2 daily newspapers. In the eighties, there was the university library, which had a lot more but the best books were always borrowed, and desk copies only. And only so many bought books were within budget.

Recently, I spent a couple months at my Mum's country house without a car or internet at home, bringing only a stack of newly bought nonfiction books with me. The only entertainment was the intro cable TV package, excluding the movies and sports. I got more out of those books than I had since before the internet and wikipedia etc became widespread. It brought back memories of earlier times, when there was LESS knowledge at my fingertips than I knew what to do with, instead of FAR MORE knowledge.

Definitely reading any book is in a way like meditation, you get more out of it than googling some facts on some random website.