The temptation of information

One of the things I complained about in my anti-art essay ( http://arfer.net/w/unfulfilled-art ) was the potential for art to exert a "drain on one's attention and appetite for minutiae": "The seeming diversity and depth of art is false". I experience this problem first-hand when I get sucked into reading really obscure trivia on TV Tropes. But when I think about it, I realize that this problem isn't specific to fiction or art. It's more of a problem with the information age.

Think of the example I mentioned in the essay of the digestive system of spiders. I remain confident that spider digestion is inherently worth our attention in a way The Simpsons isn't. Indeed, a life dedicated to the study of spider digestion would be a life well spent in my book. But most poor souls who get sucked into reading about spider digestion on Wikipedia or something aren't arachnologists. Even if what they learn ends up being somehow useful, learning about arachnids probably isn't what they ought to be doing right now. If they're anything like me, they're just being distracted from what they actually intend to do by that deadly combination of natural curiosity and the Internet.

What this observation suggests to me is, the information age belongs to people who are good not at multitasking but selective attention. There's such a colossal deluge of stuff that's kind of worth reading that if allow your lust for information to roam free, you're not going to accomplish what you could. You'll be too busy learning a little about everything to investigate deep secrets or complete great projects. At the same time, you want to be curious and exploratory enough to benefit in your own endeavors from the Internet's store of accumulated knowledge. Otherwise, you'll reinvent wheels like some kind of hermit. So you have to filter your diet of information aggressively but not mercilessly.

Only recently have I been telling myself about things "You don't really need to know." It's an unfamiliar, unpleasant feeling, to deliberately cut myself off from something I want to know about.

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Eh, people like to do this. There are many fields of industry that are in "maintenance mode", i.e. that don't really need to advance much. For example if you're somebody who has a lawn service business, do you need to use your leisure time to change the world, or can you just chill? I feel like it's not that important to advance everything technologically. If this world was going to advance something and place special importance on using time wisely, I'd much rather see it be a spiritual or moral advancement.

I don't know what constitutes spiritual advancement, but surely the only hope there is for moral advancement is to actually change human nature, which will require technology, although maybe social engineering techniques more than mechanical kinds of technology.

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But how do you know what you "ought" to be doing right now? And how do you know what information is useful without collecting as much as possible? Many great advances came from inspirations drawn while not actively thinking about the problem at hand, because they saw a connection between two things that didn't seem connected.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)

But how do you know what you "ought" to be doing right now?

Your personal values, your boss's orders, etc.

And how do you know what information is useful without collecting as much as possible? Many great advances came from inspirations drawn while not actively thinking about the problem at hand, because they saw a connection between two things that didn't seem connected.

You don't; not for sure, at least. That's part of the problem. It's always possible that you'll somehow benefit from reading one more thing, but if you spend all your time reading, you'll (tautologically) never do anything else.

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But nobody spends literally all of their time reading, so that's sort of a meaningless tautology (which I guess tautologies always/mostly are).

Well, yes, the danger is not literally spending all your of time reading, but spending so much time digesting stuff that already exists that you're left with little time to create stuff.

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