Man ponders thresholds for interest and relevance while being attacked by shark

Great Barrier Reef, AU - Media attention has focused recently on the enigma that is Paul Munn, with many of our readers wanting to delve deeper into the mind of this rising star in the academic world to find out what motivates him and drives his priorities.

Our reporter was able to obtain an exclusive interview with this hard to reach figure as Munn was being attacked by a great white off of the coast of southern Australia.

The first question on everyone’s mind was how Munn dealt with the deluge of information coming at him every day. Certainly, all of us are overwhelmed by how much material there is to consume on a daily basis, but this is especially true for those in the scientific community.

Although admittedly a little preoccupied, Munn responded, “It’s important to consider how interesting and relevant something has to be in order for it to be compelling.”

He went on to say, “Interest is not a binary concept. Something is not either interesting or not interesting; it’s more of a spectrum, and by extension, each of us has a threshold on that spectrum that a new experience has to exceed in order for us to want to pay attention to it. The same could be said of relevance, although the two are somewhat intertwined.

So, while the acquisition of knowledge is valuable for its own sake, the unfortunate reality is that we can’t simply be content to expose ourselves to new experiences in a random fashion. In modern life our attention is so fragmented that a new experience has pretty high bar to surpass in order for it to show up on our radar.”

To make this point more concretely, our reporter was quick to suggest that the rows of razor sharp teeth contained in the powerful jaws attempting to clamp onto Munn’s torso would serve as an excellent example.

“Yes,” said Munn, “This is definitely a new experience, which is necessary but not sufficient to make it worthy of consideration. In terms of its relevance to my professional goals, well, it’s certainly relevant to my continuing to have professional goals, so for that reason alone it’s something worth paying attention to.”

After a brief pause while he struggled to sink his thumb into the forty foot long carnivor’s eye socket, Munn continued, “It would be nice to be able to schedule things like this, but when viewed objectively you’d have to conclude that it falls into the category of things that are better dealt with as they come up. Let’s face it, it’s only going to get worse if I don’t come up with an appropriate response in its early stages.”

At press time, Munn was scanning the pages of a paper on sexual dimorphism in meiotic recombination, trying to find something that exceeded his threshold for interesting and relevant. He also noted that the railings outside his window had recently been painted and warranted being kept an eye on. Frankly, it was a toss up between the two.