Have We Reached Peak Wonder?

At some point in the mid-aughts, the internet reached a point where you could ask almost any question, and somebody could give you an answer. Depending on what you wanted to know, forums like Metafilter, Yahoo! Answers, and Reddit had people from all walks of life who could tap into their expertise to answer your question or at least point you in the right direction.

And on Twitter, the benefit of reaching a few thousand followers was that you had a wide enough audience that you could throw out a question to the “hive mind” and someone out there could probably help you out.

But somewhere in the past few years, the way I think about this has changed. I no longer ask myself where to go to ask the right question. I ask myself where someone has already asked it, so I can find the answer that has already been given.

With millions of people asking questions online over the past two decades, sometimes it feels like everything there is to ask has already been asked. Even when I can’t find a satisfying answer, I can usually find someone who asked the same question already.

Just the other day, Google tweeted:

It feels like the answer is probably yes. If not at this exact moment, then at some point in the past, anyway.

Reddit has a couple of interesting forums called /r/AskHistorians and /r/AskScience each with millions of members. These are places that curious people can ask experts questions about things they wonder, like “Would my great-great-grandfather have ever eaten a banana?” or “When eyeballs are donated by an organ donor, does the left eyeball have to be put in the left eye socket of the new body?” Great questions! But I am amazed at how often I see questions on those forums answered with links to earlier posts where that has already been answered.

There’s a forum called /r/WhatIsThisThing where people post photos of unusual objects they’ve found and people help them identify it. Enough people have wondered about the same strange things that they have a list of Frequently Asked Things.

In fact, so many questions have been asked and answered on Reddit that it’s been observed that if you add “reddit” to a Google search query, you’re more likely to find good answers than if you just let Google serve up its own top results, which are often littered with SEO-targeted nonsense.

Curiosity vs Creativity

So is it possible that every good question has already been asked? To test this, I tried coming up with reasonable questions that may not have been asked before, to see if I could find answers already on this internet. It turns out that it’s a very difficult exercise.

I could come up with completely nonsense questions like, “Could an elephant give birth to a tree?” or “How does a cloud know it’s Tuesday?” and of course those don’t have answers already online. But trying to come up with a good question that’s never been asked feels a bit like trying to invent a new useful gadget on demand. It’s not something that can happen spontaneously. It need to be arrived at naturally.

It makes me realize that curiosity is a lot like creativity. Every now and then there’s a genuinely new idea. But more often, creativity and invention build on previous ideas. Sometimes it even feels like a novel concept is “in the air” and people develop applications for existing technology at the same time (just ask Antonio Meucci). Similarly, every good question comes from somewhere.

Something lights the spark of curiosity that gets someone to ask a question. Maybe it’s something in the news, or an observation in nature, or a frustration with something. But whatever it is, it’s unlikely that only one person out of billions over time would have that same spark of curiosity. And the longer we have the internet, and the more forums we have for people to share their curiosity and lend their expertise, the more likely we are to find the question has already been asked and answered. At least as long as the archives of those forums are preserved.

So all this leads me to wonder: At some point, will we reach Peak Wonder, where more questions have been answered than there are left to ask?

I’m sure I’d find that even this question has already been asked, if I search for it.

That’s it for this edition of the newsletter. What? No inventor profile? No look at some weird moment in history? No crazy off-the-wall ideas? Nope. I was feeling philosophical this week. More of all that to come!

Until next time.

David