RABBIT HOLES

Bigger than Black Holes, sucking in more energy, and maybe, just maybe, creating new Universes…

In August 1862, a thirty-year-old Cheshire-born maths lecturer and a colleague took a three mile boat trip up the Thames with three children on board. He had taken the same children on the same route five weeks earlier, and was now retracing his steps, or oar-strokes:

“In the afternoon Harcourt and I took the three Liddells up to Godstow, where we had tea: we tried the game of ‘the Ural Mountains’ on the way, but it did not prove very successful, and I had to go on with my interminable fairy tale of ‘Alice’s Adventures.’

Lewis Carroll had fallen down a rabbit hole and would not climb back until the second Alice book, Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, was published almost a decade later.

Rabbit holes are occupational hazards in The Business of Pleasure, and they come in all shapes and sizes.

Ray Bradbury’s novella The Fireman took nine days to write, but it was almost three years before, after another nine-day burst of additions and revisions, before it emerged as the novel Fahrenheit 451.

While François Truffaut, who later directed the classic sci-fi movie version of Fahrenheit 451, spent a week interviewing his hero Alfred Hitchcock in August 1962 — exactly a century after Carroll’s second boat trip — and the resulting book finally emerged, after four years of editing, as one of the most influential works on filmmaking ever written.

A third God-like figure in the Pantheon of Cinema, Stanley Kubrick, spent the two years after 2001 researching a film about Napoleon that never got made, which may have earned a Gallic shrug from Bonaparte himself, having spent almost four years down his own personal terrier du lapin, attempting to reassert French control over Saint-Domingue by overthrowing the ‘Black Napoleon,’ Toussaint Louverture, and in the process losing around 50,000 men and a brother-in-law.

Rabbit holes tend to get a bad Press by and large, but like Alice, it is curiosity that draws us to them:

‘but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.’

We in The Business of Pleasure are particularly susceptible to rabbit holes; compelled inexorably, and inexplicably, towards the unknown that lies beyond, whatever the trigger, whatever the consequences:

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”

In 137 PA (Post Alice), a landmark paper, ‘Information Foraging’ (Pirolli and Card, 1999*), traced the principles governing our information searches back to their (tree) roots and the rabbit/fox/ferret holes of physical terrain.

‘Analogies Between Food Foraging and Information Foraging‘ Imagine a predator, such as a bird of prey, that faces the recurrent problem of deciding what to eat, and assume that its fitness, in terms of reproductive success, is dependent on energy intake. Energy flows into the environment and comes to be stored in different forms.  For the bird of prey, different types of habitat and prey will yield different amounts of energy (energetic profitability) if included in the diet.  Furthermore, the different food-source types will have different distributions over the environment…’

Adding:

‘An analogous situation in information foraging theory might be an office worker or academic researcher facing the recurrent problems of finding task-relevant information. Information flows into the environment to be represented in different types of external media, such as books, manuscripts, or on-line documents.  The different information sources (or repositories) will have different profitabilities, in terms of the amount of useful information returned per unit cost in processing the source.’

And later:

‘Information patches: Problems of Time Allocation to Activities                                                      Patch models in optimal foraging theory concern situations in which the environment of some particular animal has a ‘patchy’ structure. For instance, imagine a bird that forages for berries found in patches on berry bushes.  The forager must expend some amount of between patches time getting to the next food patch. Once in a patch, the forager engages in within-patch foraging and faces the decision of continuing to forage in the patch or leave it to seek a new one.’

Now if there is anyone out there in The Business of Pleasure, be they musicians, cinematographers, writers or artists, who hasn’t experienced the above dilemma when burrowing down their respective rabbit-holes, do please, please, please, share your secret. 

And if you think AI might make this kind of thing easier, beware!

AI may present you with a super-rabbit-hole, as a paper from earlier this year suggests:

‘From an IFT (Information Foraging Theory) perspective, GenAI provides a novel and interesting information environment (Flores et al., 2024), inter alia, due to its conversational interaction, its contextual memory of ongoing and previous conversations, and its ability to generate new content in response to idiosyncratic promps (Kim et al., 2025; Ragavan & Alipour, (2024). Ragavan and Alipour (2024) considered GenAI to be a single patch, or rather a non-patch environment that evolves with each interaction between the user and the GanAI. Foraging information in a GenAI environment could blind users to other, more profitable sources, because the potential benefits of alternative sources are unknowingly forfeited (Ragavan and LIPOUR, 2024). GenAI epitomizes the tension between ease of access to complex information and its ability of generating biased and inaccurate content (Yen et al., 2025); similarly, traditional scent cues are not necessarily accurate (e.g. fabricated) or available.’**

But the last word on rabbit holes, be they actual, factual or AI generated, must go to Alice herself:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

DT 20 August 2026