Sunday, February 19, 2006

Treating Specific Cases of a Concept As the General Concept Itself

If you're constantly checking information -- your emails, the stats on your website, etc -- that doesn't need to be checked so often, you're being unproductive. This is the pretty obvious point made in this article.

Fair enough, except the article is called 'The Inefficiency of Being Too Curious'. Isn't that going a bit far? The article isn't talking about curiousity in general, but a very specific situation. And I don't think its results are generalisable to curiosity in general.

To me, this is an example of a very common tendancy to treat a specific case of a general concept as the general concept itself. When this is done, a more specfic, narrower result is mistakenly presented as a more general, more universal one.

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