Thinkbait

There are some things that you think about because they're useful or interesting, because of their consequences or because the outcome of understanding them would be useful. There are things you think about because exploring the ideas brings you some degree of joy or delight. Then there are the things that you think about because you just can't seem to stop thinking about them.

This latter category seems to take up a vastly disproportionate amount of thinking time for its value. I'm talking about the internet outrage of the day, whoever said whatever inflammatory thing (oh that's so that person though), warmed-over debates in politics, philosophy or religion, and problems that it's far easier to have an opinion about than to think through properly.

For some reason, certain topics just seem to compel thinking, whether or not it's useful or even fun thinking. Parkinson had his law of triviality, later known as bikeshedding, observing that trivial things like bike shed colours get more attention because it's easier to have opinions about them. Randall Monroe described nerd sniping, where you can pose a tantalising problem to a nerd, who will get so carried away with it they lose their survival instincts.

In the former case, thinking about the bike shed colour is a total waste of time. In the latter, it is actually an interesting problem, but probably the more interesting problem at the time is how to cross the road safely. So it's not a binary thing of either useful or useless thinking, more that there's some degree of value an idea has, and then some degree of compulsion it generates. In both cases the compulsion outweighs the value.

In news, we recognised a similar problem: headlines convey some amount of information, and have some degree of compulsion. Over time the compulsion rose out of proportion to the information, and we ended up with clickbait. In a similar vein, I think of these disproportionatly compulsive ideas as thinkbait. And, like clickbait, I think they're worth avoiding.