Time is the difference between superficiality and scholarship

Many science questions emerge from a place similar to what Penn Jillette describes in this quote about people’s attitudes to video games. (Emphasis added.)

You know, when I was 15, 16, 17-years-old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games.

The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20^th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong.

The cliché of the nerdy kid who doesn’t go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it’s also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It’s beautiful. That kind of obsession is going to lead to a sophisticated 30-year-old who has a background in that artform.

I think about this quote a lot.

It seems to me that many people who ask questions about science are working from that background of “They listened to Dylan for 15 minutes.”. They’ve been exposed to a few basic ideas. They’ve maybe had one or two lectures in high school about evolution. They get reproduction is important. They get that natural selection leads to adaptation. They get “survival of the fittest.”


But they haven’t mastered the art. So they ask why human evolution has stopped (it hasn’t) or why some trait is so obviously bad (lots of reasons). They can’t get those nuances without having spent that time on task.

Same with people who think that half an hour Googling an answer constitutes “independent research” on climate change or vaccines or what have you. Sorry, that’s the equivalent of listening to The Rite of Spring once.

It’s similar to what I talked about recently: you need time to live with ideas to understand the subtleties.

Related posts

Some “light bulb moments” are controlled by dimmers, not switches

External links

Penn Jillette Is Tired Of The Video Game Bulls***