boredom is a form of pain

towards a theory of tedium

A while back I wrote:

“I might even write “in defence of tedium” one day, because it’s a means for people who don’t actually care about something to select out of having a view on it. Boredom is a form of pain; it takes the place of the wonderful imaginary machine which might administer a small electric shock to anyone publishing a #take without doing the background reading.”

Well, it looks like that day has come, and in thinking about how to write the #take in question, I ended up deciding it was a little more complicated than that. I feel like I have earned my credentials in thinking about boredom; I write a weekly newsletter about financial regulation, among other things. I’ve even got into payments systems, which I’ve described in the past as “combining the erotic charge of double entry book-keeping, with the adrenaline rush of telecoms engineering”.

To begin: Boredom is a form of pain, and like any other kind of pain it is an important signal which should not be ignored. In the context of reading difficult texts, what is going on when something becomes unbearably tedious is that you are engaged in a repetitive task without being able to enter the “flow” state. You aren’t getting regular rewards and advancements because you’re not really understanding what you’re reading. It’s an absence of intellectual infrastructure – the facts aren’t getting processed quickly and easily because you don’t have the conceptual structure to put them in. I don’t think it’s possible to be really bored by something you understand; you might think “ho hum, I know this already”, but there isn’t the sensation of almost physical dullness that overtakes the brain when you’re really bored.

And that’s why I say it’s dangerous to ignore boredom, like any other form of pain. Boredom is, specifically, a signal that you’re reading the wrong thing. If you push through it, then you’re potentially building a flawed understanding; like an overworked joint, you’re going to lose flexibility and have a hell of a time unpicking the things you mislearned. You might be exaggerating the importance of some things and missing others, you might be getting steps out of order, you’re likely to be target-fixated on details rather than understanding how they arise from underlying principles.

This kind of understanding can carry you a long way – it’s possible to get through an advanced degree in a mathematical subject without really being able to think mathematically – and if you absolutely need to get through something for professional reasons, it’s a lot better than nothing. But you’re doing long term damage to your brain by training it the wrong way, just like some people do with their bodies.

So you need to pay attention to your boredom, and start thinking about what’s causing it. As I say earlier, unless the boredom is being caused intentionally as a literary effect[1], it’s a sign that you’re reading the wrong thing. This might be because it’s not aimed at you; the infrastructure is missing because the author presumes that anyone reading their text will already have it. Or it might be just because the thing you’re reading is crap, lazily written by someone who doesn’t expect it to be read by anyone at all, or by someone who doesn’t understand the subject themselves.

Falling somewhere between the two categories are cases where the conceptual infrastructure has to be left out because it’s a text with specific causal powers – a law, policy statement or accounting standard or the like. These things are a pain to read because they make huge use of boilerplate which needs to be precise, where the necessary infrastructure is quite big and it can’t be included for fear of creating ambiguity.

I like the way that some accounting standards bodies used to deal with this – the “black letter” format, where you distinguish between the actual standard and the explanatory text by changing the font, and everyone agrees that while the grey text is the bit you read, the black letters are all you can rely on in any dispute. Unfortunately, the IASB stopped doing this about ten years ago, claiming that it caused other problems.

For the moment, I have not had any luck at all in getting AI to generate infrastructure or to “black-letterise” any of the official documents I read in my everyday business. (There are a lot of companies trying to do this as a commercial product; talking to people in various walks of life I don’t get the impression that there is any of them that works reliably yet). I think this is probably an issue of the training data, in that a model trained on ordinary language isn’t going to pick up this very specialised use and there might not be enough volume of good quality black-letter texts to use for a transformer neural network to pick up whatever underlying structure it needs.

[1] I first found the phrase “boredom is a form of pain” in my mind while reading “American Psycho”, where I genuinely believe that the author was piling up absurdly long and tedious lists of graphically described horrors in order to try to make the reader experience the nearest thing to pain he could inflict, rather like that Situationist idea of a book with a sandpaper cover, so it could literally attack other books on the shelf.