Shallow research and less curious than hoped

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For inspiration, I have been borrowing books from my friendly local public library on broad topics like curiosity and creativity. One is Seth Goldenberg’s 2022 book titled Radical Curiosity: Questioning commonly held beliefs to imagine flourishing futures. There is an excerpt titled The Wonder of New Ideas at the Stanford SOCIAL INNOVATION Review on September 20, 2022. On Page 10 of the book, under the heading of CHALLENGING COMMONLY HELD BELIEFS, he boldly claims:

 

“…. Often commonly held beliefs are so common they are camouflaged. Identifying a commonly held belief, peeling back the assumptions it is built upon, and restlessly seeking interventions and leverage points for greater impact is the life cycle of a challenger. People who are Radically Curious are ferociously hungry in their pursuit of knowledge, not as a fixed resource but as an ongoing process. Radical Curiosity is the greatest expression of what it means to be a philosopher: an engaged thinker dedicated to the reconstruction of new knowledge.”

 

What did Seth do in a specific case? Did he peel back all the assumptions? No, his research was just shallow. His second paragraph on page 124 says:

 

“According to a 2015 study conducted by Microsoft researchers in Canada, the average person generally loses their concentration after eight seconds, a drop from 12 seconds in the year 2000. Considering that the length of a goldfish’s memory is documented to be about nine seconds, it may be safe to say that we have become less focused than goldfish. …”

 

That is complete nonsense, which I blogged about in a post on August 5, 2020 titled When doing research, your attention span should be more than 10 seconds. A note in the back of Seth’s book refers to an article by Kevin McSpadden in Time on May 14, 2015 titled You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. But it doesn’t mention memory – just attention. And McSpadden missed that the Microsoft report doesn’t say those attention spans came from their research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above (on page 6 of the Microsoft report), they got them from a commercial web site called Statistic Brain. Both the BBC and Wall Street Journal determined that Statistic Brain just had made them up.