Wednesday, December 08, 2021

Immediate Gratification

If you look on my sidebar at the moment, you will see there is a Quillette article about patterns in superspreader events, which looks promising to me.  But if you click through, it will be "not found."  It likely won't take that long to fix whatever few letters they entered wrongly on the link and we get to read it, but I am frustrated.

Update:  It is still not up.  I suspect it was an older article, which would of course be less interesting now that we have much more information.

How spoiled I have become. I was just writing to my new daughter-in-law about how hard it was to find articles and books at all, when I sought certain titles in the 1970's.  You had to find a library that carried that journal or magazine.  You had to know which used booksellers might have connections and knowledge in particular areas, and if you didn't live in a big city, you had to make a special trip to Boston to chat with a guy-who-knew-a-guy about your topic. Or really embed in the network of used booksellers in your region so that you could travel out to Henniker or Portsmouth and see what they had.

I don't think I could comfortably go back to the world of my youth, never mind Victorian or Medieval times. Better to just read about those and pretend.

1 comment:

Doug said...

More concerning is what this immediate gratification may be doing to our brains, and our ability work on tasks that have delayed gratification (but are more beneficial in the long run). As you mentioned in a previous post, our impulsiveness may be a genetic trait. For those who show resistance to impulsiveness, this may not matter much. But to those who already struggle, easy access to superficial but dopamine generating gratification may cause these individuals from starting a position that is even further behind. The impact on developing minds is also very worrisome.