The Wit’s Guide to Rabbit Holes

Or, learning yearning

Even hard-working giant lagomorphs ponder the infinite sometimes.

When your brain wants to distract itself, it finds a rabbit hole. The rules are clearly delineated by Lewis Carroll in the first lines of Alice in Wonderland. In a listless state — “the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid” — you happily encounter (or imagine) something that leaves you “burning with curiosity.” You jump in without hesitation, encounter all manner of unexpected marvels, and eventually emerge energized, not depleted.

“Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk.”
— Cyril Connolly

Rabbit holes are the most pleasurable way to learn, for the reason that falls directly in between two of my all-time favourite quips. First of all, you’re procrastinating, so you’re in compliance with Benchley’s Law:

“Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”
— Robert Benchley

And second, you’re choosing your own serendipitous and autodidactic adventure. This saves you from Crisp’s Paradox:

“We can be offered only two kinds of information — what we already know, which is boring, and what we do not, which is humiliating.”
— Quentin Crisp

If you’re concentrating on a task and find yourself down a rabbit hole, that’s your brain’s way of alerting you to the fact that the task at hand was boring! But if an algorithm leads you to a rabbit hole, does it count? It’s not true serendipity, even if the fleshy mass within our skulls identifies it as such. By this reasoning, there are no rabbit holes on TikTok. Call them instead rabbit traps, the sucralose to the sugar of true discovery.

“Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit!”
— R. E. Shay

It wasn’t always thus. I think of early Twitter, when it still felt relatively unpruned and wild. Margaret Atwood memorably described her introduction to the medium, back when she was — in my new favourite phrase — “innocent as an egg unboiled.” In trying to parse the format, she wondered, “Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.” In retrospect, put the emphasis on human beings.

“The brain that doesn’t feed itself eats itself.”
— Gore Vidal

In his new book The Explorer’s Gene, Alex Hutchison explains how dopamine is not simply the “pleasure chemical” but rather a way to “signal the presence of a reward that was better than expected.” When you jump down a rabbit hole, you likely don’t expect to find much at the other end. A few nuggets of interesting info would then qualify as a reward prediction error. But in the You May Also Like rabbit trap, where you always basically know what you’re going to get, the dopamine stops.

“Curiosity enriches us but it also destroys concentration.”
— Yevengy Yevtushenko

In the right human hands, though, you can enjoy serendipity second hand.

Annie Rauwerda

is the proprietor of Depths of Wikipedia and therefore the queen of rabbit holes. In theory, anyone could curate random facts from the world’s best website, but in practice you need a certain sensibility to pull it off. You know how the Liberal Party of Canada alternates between anglophone and francophone leaders? Rauwerda points to a similar 199-year-old tradition by which Russian leaders alternate between bald and hairy. Follow her lead like an egg unboiled!

“There are popemobile moments everywhere for those with eyes to see.”
— Annie Rauwerda

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Introducing the Slop-Free Guarantee

I hereby declare that I have not smashed any mechanized looms to date, and *checks calendar* I have no immediate loom-smashing plans.

That’s because I am not a Luddite! But neither am I a … and here I stopped to use ChatGPT to suggest some evocative words for the opposite of a Luddite but didn’t get anything good. Technophile? Not quite. Cyborg sympathizer? Gadgeteer? Yesbot? WiFidel? Sigh.

And there you have it: Artificial intelligence in its current form is marvelous, uncanny, terrifying, annoying, astonishing, and tedious. For the most part, I stand by what I wrote in early 2023: It’s a phenomenal generator of halfwit at scale.

The Wit's Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Though I’ve come to appreciate

Ethan Mollick

’s idea of co-intelligence, and the trite line that AI won’t take your job but someone who knows AI better than you will take your job. (And then you’ll have the pleasure of watching that guy’s job get taken by AI from the vantage point of your cardboard box on the street.)

So yes, I use my ChatGPT subscription on a daily basis, reminding myself never to put glue on pizza even as I’m continually amazed by what it can do. But also on a daily basis, I encounter things like this ludicrously overwritten project from a college student on the wall of my child’s school:

This is slop! In the

Max Read

definition of the word, slop is “low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet — and beyond.” You know it when you see it, and nowadays you see it everywhere. With infectious enthusiasm and palpable excitement!

But not here!

I’ll continue to use AI whenever it makes sense — but I’ll never allow it to make the sense for me. That’s my Slop Free Guarantee, which is really just committing to keep doing human things for humans until the cold mechanized hands pull me away from the keyboard. It’s obvious and used to go without saying, though it seems like now we need to say it. So here, live at slopfreeguarantee.com, slopfree.org, and the novelty domain slop.free, is my Slop-Free Guarantee. Do you also do human things for humans? Grab a badge, link back, and join me!

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“I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has. Not an interesting life perhaps, but a very peaceful one.”
— Agatha Christie

The best thing about writing this newsletter each week is that it blocks out mandatory rabbit hole time on my calendar. I’ve yet to catch the lagomorph but I’m sure he’s down here somewhere.

This is how Get Wit Quick Issue No. 311 wraps up, which is a much better ending than poor François Vatel. As majordomo to Louis XIV, he was so distraught over a late delivery of seafood that he fell on his sword. Thanks, Annie! The mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Some rabbit holes lead to the Queen of ❤️s.