The tragic quality of wonder in a competitive attention economy

Thinkwert published this delightful little troll/joke on Twitter:

I knew that it was false because I’ve previously done a touch of reading on the Paleomycology of giant extinct mushrooms so I know there aren’t any this size presently. However it occurred to me that if I hadn’t done that reading, I would still immediately know it was false, because anything that cool would have been bought to my attention long ago if it existed.

This is the tragic quality of being an adult who pays attention in a world where people are constantly competing for your attention. You’ve doubtless already seen the best trump cards already.

Of course, the world is stuffed with enough wonder that you hardly need go hungry for it. Did you know that bears love eating dandelions?

Still, there is something a tad sad about this condition where we can dismiss organisms (and other phenomena- this isn’t just about biology) as too cool to exist. I call this the Tragic Quality of Wonder (TQW), and it’s both a sad existential condition and a useful epistemic rule for frontline skepticism against possible hoaxes.

The TQW helps fuel, I think, the passionate hope of many cryptozoologists that we’ll find some previously unknown form of really cool megafauna. It also fuels my interest in new technologies like Large Language Models- preexisting wonders I will have heard of, but wonders that have only just come into being may be yet unknown.