At some point it maybe helpful to define curiosity. My sense of the meaning of curiosity is that it’s an urge to learn something that you suspect maybe important to know at some point, even if it may not matter now. A paper I read recently (http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/curioussingapore/curioussingapore.html) defined curiosity more formally, as a special kind of search strategy that focuses on places that your experience shows have a higher than average probability of teaching you something useful. This doesn’t seem too far from my definition.
It seems to me that stopped curiosity is not necessarily a big problem.
In my terms, what you seem to be talking about is an inquiry stopper, which is a bigger deal. If you think that it’s actually important to know how a lightbulb works—if you need to know about light bulbs—it’s a process of inquiry, not merely curiosity.
Stopping curiosity is an interesting issue in itself, but the dynamics are likely to be a bit different from stopping inquiry, although there is significant overlap.
We all live in a world of bounded rationality. We use satisficing strategies, controlled by a variety of stopping heuristics, to learn enough about the world to get by (and curiosity is part of that strategy, by giving us some kind of good enough cover in the event that the models we might otherwise have turn out to be too simple or too wrong). That we stop before learning everything possible is hardly remarkable. But I enjoy how you are getting us to think about certain specific stopping heuristics that might be insidiously impairing us.
Last night I looked over some philosophical writing I did twenty years ago, and I’m impressed by how much I took for granted, and how little I questioned. It’s full of unabashedly sweeping statements based on what I now realize were very naive assumptions. I found myself reading it and yelling at my younger self “Why did you stop there? Keep opening the black boxes! Continue the questioning!”
At some point it maybe helpful to define curiosity. My sense of the meaning of curiosity is that it’s an urge to learn something that you suspect maybe important to know at some point, even if it may not matter now. A paper I read recently (http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/curioussingapore/curioussingapore.html) defined curiosity more formally, as a special kind of search strategy that focuses on places that your experience shows have a higher than average probability of teaching you something useful. This doesn’t seem too far from my definition.
It seems to me that stopped curiosity is not necessarily a big problem.
In my terms, what you seem to be talking about is an inquiry stopper, which is a bigger deal. If you think that it’s actually important to know how a lightbulb works—if you need to know about light bulbs—it’s a process of inquiry, not merely curiosity.
Stopping curiosity is an interesting issue in itself, but the dynamics are likely to be a bit different from stopping inquiry, although there is significant overlap.
We all live in a world of bounded rationality. We use satisficing strategies, controlled by a variety of stopping heuristics, to learn enough about the world to get by (and curiosity is part of that strategy, by giving us some kind of good enough cover in the event that the models we might otherwise have turn out to be too simple or too wrong). That we stop before learning everything possible is hardly remarkable. But I enjoy how you are getting us to think about certain specific stopping heuristics that might be insidiously impairing us.
Last night I looked over some philosophical writing I did twenty years ago, and I’m impressed by how much I took for granted, and how little I questioned. It’s full of unabashedly sweeping statements based on what I now realize were very naive assumptions. I found myself reading it and yelling at my younger self “Why did you stop there? Keep opening the black boxes! Continue the questioning!”