I don't think this is necessarily limited just to smart people but it's just more a trait of curious people (perhaps there is a correlation there?) or just the intellectually insecure.
For example I don't consider myself an especially intelligent person (on the right side of average I hope), however I know people who are very intelligent and can talk at length with authority on a vast number of topics and are seemingly able to absorb and retain information instantly. Also I am exposed to forums like HN which are full of smart people.
So naturally whenever a conversation or thread comes up where I feel that I don't have anything to contribute but I know it sounds fascinating I can't help but to try and learn everything I can about it so I can weigh in next time, which in turn leads to finding gaps in my prerequisite knowledge of the subject (and interesting offshoot subjects). Which of course leads to having 12 tabs open.
This is why I think it is better to pick a few subjects that you decide you will learn in some detail and buy books on the subject.
The great thing about books is that they follow a linear progression and most importantly they end.
The problem with HN is that you can read every article on the front page along with a bunch of wikipedia, but the next day there will just be more.
> The great thing about books is that they follow a linear progression and most importantly they end.
That's the usual case, but I've found myself a few times sitting in a university library reading books in a Wikipedia-esque way. Read a few chapters of one, find an interesting footnote, grab the book it references off the shelf and follow up on that, and soon there's a pile of 15 books on my desk...
But not for other kinds of books like Novels, tutorials.
If somebody is reading a Reference book, then they are reading it the way you describe.
But if you are learning something/trying to get enough information for the moment you must know what information to neglect else the 'rabbit hole' problem is inevitable.
Another major advantage of books is structure. Well written books tend to follow a high level framework or narrative which makes it a lot easier to remember large quantities of information. I can recall significant amounts of what I read in Building the Perfect PC, and it gives me a great framework for buying components. But before I read that book I spent many more hours reading about which computers to buy online, and I recall very little from that research.
This is especially true with consumer gaming hardware blogs (apart from the obvious good ones like tom's hardware etc).
There is so much stuff written by COD/WoW obsessed teenagers that basically just regurgitates marketing points along with weird theories about how things actually work.
Luckily a rudimentary CS education does help sort the wheat from the chaff here.
This definitely isn't constrained to just smart people or curious people. I'd conjecture the vast majority of people are subjected to tangential distraction - youtube, facebook, wikipedia, reddit, hackernews, tumbler, twitter, whatever your poison.
The question is merely the quality of the distraction - if there is something such as 'distract better', perhaps we should be exploring that. Sadly, my general experience has been that the vast majority of distracted time yields negligible gain compared to concentrated pursuit of a field.
Serendipity, yes, but I find I'm far more prone to serendipity when I'm concentrated than when I'm not. Firm believer that you always find what you're looking for - and the more concretely you know what you're looking for, the faster you'll find it.
For example I don't consider myself an especially intelligent person (on the right side of average I hope), however I know people who are very intelligent and can talk at length with authority on a vast number of topics and are seemingly able to absorb and retain information instantly. Also I am exposed to forums like HN which are full of smart people.
So naturally whenever a conversation or thread comes up where I feel that I don't have anything to contribute but I know it sounds fascinating I can't help but to try and learn everything I can about it so I can weigh in next time, which in turn leads to finding gaps in my prerequisite knowledge of the subject (and interesting offshoot subjects). Which of course leads to having 12 tabs open.
This is why I think it is better to pick a few subjects that you decide you will learn in some detail and buy books on the subject.
The great thing about books is that they follow a linear progression and most importantly they end.
The problem with HN is that you can read every article on the front page along with a bunch of wikipedia, but the next day there will just be more.