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Neomania

11 Jan 2025

Neutralia by Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter of 'The Scream' fame.
In his book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli describes 99 psychological traps that humans tend to fall into. One of them is what he calls Neomania, the mania for the new.

In this post I'd like to share my thoughts on it.

The reason for it being a trap (or more generally a negative thing) is that new things have a high chance of being irrelevant. We touched on this in On Lifetime, where we mention the book Algorithms to Live By [1], which says: an estimate for the lifespan of something we have no information about is twice its current age.

Thus, it’s risky to invest time and energy on new things. Examples of neomania I can think of:

Neotrality

I believe I’m less affected by neomania than average. It’s not that I make an effort to avoid new things nor that I think it’s always best to do so, it’s just my default mode. I decided to call it neotrality, a word play between the neo prefix (meaning new) and neutrality, as in being neutral to novelty.

If I had a more negative view towards it, I could used the term neophobia.

News

On my review to Real Analysis by Jay Cummings [2] in 2023, I included a quote from the book:

Thomas Jefferson revered Isaac Newton and once wrote to John Adams: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much happier.”

And I mentioned:

I haven’t paid much attention to the news for a long time (well, except Hacker news) and in the past year or so found I enjoy reading history and math/physics a lot, so I have been focusing on those.

A big part of my neotrality to news is that I have a weird range of attention span: I can focus on texts that are one sentence (think of tweets or headlines) and books of hundreds of pages, but struggle reading things of length in between: I cannot recall the last time I read an entire article in a magazine or newspaper.

I also struggle to read blog posts (ironically, I’d have trouble reading my own posts). This is one medium I wish I could have more focus for.

Another downside of not reading the news is not having much material for small talk. I personally don’t like small talk but sometimes it’s useful for breaking awkward silences with strangers or acquaintances.

The Latest Gadget

I got my first smartphone in 2012, the work phone provided by my company. It wasn’t until many years later (2017?) that I bought my own smartphone but mostly because I wanted to develop on Android.

I wonder how long it would have taken me to get a smartphone had I not gotten one from my company.

I do save a lot of money by not buying the latest gadgets but there’s also opportunity costs: I bought an iPad last year after visiting an Apple Store (it’s such an effective marketing!) and wished I had done it sooner.

The Latest Technology

In the book The Code Breaker [3], Walter Isaacson quotes Jack Szostak, Jennifer Doudna’s PhD advisor:

Never do something that a thousand other people are doing

I tend to agree to this and find that it’s a lot harder to make a meaningful contribution in crowded areas.

Also, as I mentioned in On Lifetime:

I have a strong preference for building things that last

and relying on unproven technology often leads to throw-away exploratory projects which is not my forte.

In here too there are downsides, especially at work: I often have trouble staying on top of what other people are working on, which limits my ability to find new opportunities and project ideas.

On the other hand, I found that if something is really important or worth it, it eventually reaches me.

Conclusion

Overall I still find neotrality a net positive. It’s easy to regret things in hindsight (I wish I had bought the iPad sooner) but it helps remembering there’s a survivorship bias at play: for every iPad I didn’t buy, I also didn’t buy other devices that would not have been useful. For each tech like LLMs there’s web3 and blockchain.

The Innovator’s Dilemma reminds me of the tradeoffs between neomania and neotrality. It’s easy to blame companies that failed to innovate because they didn’t invest enough in X that startup a ABC did.

On the other hand there are many startups that invested in Y instead and disappeared from the map and conversely many other promising technologies that company did invest in and didn’t pan out. Survivorship bias again.

References

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