I think you may be placing too much emphasis on curiosity as a terminal value here rather than a means of acquiring other terminal values—not that I think it has no value in and of itself, but that’s not its only use and not its biggest in most respects.
If I know that a light switch/bulb’s properties are fully explained by science and nothing else about it, that DOES tell me things I didn’t know beforehand. It tells me that it is much less of a priority to figure out how the light bulb works than it would have been if nobody had a clue. If there is any situation in which knowledge of how it works is necessary there’s already someone who knows, and if there is a situation in the future in which I decide it would be to my benefit to learn how it works I will have little trouble learning it at that time, rather than needing to arm myself with that knowledge well in advance because I can’t predict how long it will take to acquire (this ignoring the issue of how long it would take for me to wrap my head around the concepts if I tried; it’s easier to learn if it’s already known, no matter where the baseline difficulty is set). And if there is some incredibly useful piece of low hanging fruit which could be derived from just knowledge about the light bulb, I could be confident that somebody else had found it (and if it’s not low hanging fruit, well, others have at least had as much of a shot at it as I would; unless I have reason to believe that there is something I could learn from the knowledge that others would have missed so far, in which case skip to the next paragraph). Even knowing that the keyword involved is “electricity”, which does not even begin to count as understanding, tells me SOMETHING (though not enough that a science teacher should feel justified stopping there)--it tells me which section in the phone book to look at if I need someone to fix my lightswitch, or which section of the library to look in to learn about it myself. The former is all some people will need to know about lightswitches for their entire lives.
Of course I know a good deal more about it than that, and in fact some of my knowledge will be useful to me in a real way in my real life. But the knowledge about what organ X does and where it is, is not directly useful to me in the same way—for all practical purposes it’s good enough that I can ask a doctor or search certain trustworthy portions of the internet for the answer to any question about what I should do from a medical perspective in most situations. Yes, knowledge of medicine being more immediately on hand might help me react faster to a problem and a situation may come up where I personally ought to know CPR and don’t, but my situation isn’t as bad as if nobody knew this information. And I can teach myself most of the useful things that you can/must do immediately and with no equipment or pills, without ever needing to know how the inside of my body really looks.
This only applies to things unrelated to the fields you do care about. If you care about or expect to be involved in making AI, knowledge of all things computer and how electricity works and how modern computer chips are built and anything you can learn about existing intelligences is valuable. Knowledge of what your liver does, however, isn’t just somebody else’s problem; it’s not a problem. If you feel curious about the liver that’s great, but if not you don’t really have to.
The example with the elephant isn’t great, because that is a situation in which I would care about the knowledge, and would seek to either ask the person who knows about it to explain to me or, if the explanation turns out to be far more difficult and/or long than I am willing to accept, will ask him all the predictive questions I would’ve been able to answer if I knew about it, such as “Is this going to get worse if I ignore it until a more convenient time”, “How do I make it leave”, “Is my house in danger” or even the almighty “Is there anything else important I should know about this” (because it is a human being who knows about it, not a genie, and he can predict what facts I’d consider important even if I don’t know what to ask for). Or if even that was too hard (or he was unwilling to tell me), at least to remove it from the room for me.
The example of you waving your hands to create light and calling it science would also not stop me until I became convinced that significantly more people than just you knew it and that some of these people would be willing to tell me if I asked. But that’s because my curiosity about the light as a whole would stem as much from mistrust of another person to apply that knowledge to humanity’s general benefit as from real curiosity. You can’t hold out on me with the knowledge that that light can also cure cancer if I also understand what you do about the light, or if I know that a number of other people unlikely to share a stake with you in any enterprise know it.
The real danger would be if that elephant had been in my room since the day I was born and I didn’t know enough to be curious about it.
I think you may be placing too much emphasis on curiosity as a terminal value here rather than a means of acquiring other terminal values—not that I think it has no value in and of itself, but that’s not its only use and not its biggest in most respects.
If I know that a light switch/bulb’s properties are fully explained by science and nothing else about it, that DOES tell me things I didn’t know beforehand. It tells me that it is much less of a priority to figure out how the light bulb works than it would have been if nobody had a clue. If there is any situation in which knowledge of how it works is necessary there’s already someone who knows, and if there is a situation in the future in which I decide it would be to my benefit to learn how it works I will have little trouble learning it at that time, rather than needing to arm myself with that knowledge well in advance because I can’t predict how long it will take to acquire (this ignoring the issue of how long it would take for me to wrap my head around the concepts if I tried; it’s easier to learn if it’s already known, no matter where the baseline difficulty is set). And if there is some incredibly useful piece of low hanging fruit which could be derived from just knowledge about the light bulb, I could be confident that somebody else had found it (and if it’s not low hanging fruit, well, others have at least had as much of a shot at it as I would; unless I have reason to believe that there is something I could learn from the knowledge that others would have missed so far, in which case skip to the next paragraph). Even knowing that the keyword involved is “electricity”, which does not even begin to count as understanding, tells me SOMETHING (though not enough that a science teacher should feel justified stopping there)--it tells me which section in the phone book to look at if I need someone to fix my lightswitch, or which section of the library to look in to learn about it myself. The former is all some people will need to know about lightswitches for their entire lives.
Of course I know a good deal more about it than that, and in fact some of my knowledge will be useful to me in a real way in my real life. But the knowledge about what organ X does and where it is, is not directly useful to me in the same way—for all practical purposes it’s good enough that I can ask a doctor or search certain trustworthy portions of the internet for the answer to any question about what I should do from a medical perspective in most situations. Yes, knowledge of medicine being more immediately on hand might help me react faster to a problem and a situation may come up where I personally ought to know CPR and don’t, but my situation isn’t as bad as if nobody knew this information. And I can teach myself most of the useful things that you can/must do immediately and with no equipment or pills, without ever needing to know how the inside of my body really looks.
This only applies to things unrelated to the fields you do care about. If you care about or expect to be involved in making AI, knowledge of all things computer and how electricity works and how modern computer chips are built and anything you can learn about existing intelligences is valuable. Knowledge of what your liver does, however, isn’t just somebody else’s problem; it’s not a problem. If you feel curious about the liver that’s great, but if not you don’t really have to.
The example with the elephant isn’t great, because that is a situation in which I would care about the knowledge, and would seek to either ask the person who knows about it to explain to me or, if the explanation turns out to be far more difficult and/or long than I am willing to accept, will ask him all the predictive questions I would’ve been able to answer if I knew about it, such as “Is this going to get worse if I ignore it until a more convenient time”, “How do I make it leave”, “Is my house in danger” or even the almighty “Is there anything else important I should know about this” (because it is a human being who knows about it, not a genie, and he can predict what facts I’d consider important even if I don’t know what to ask for). Or if even that was too hard (or he was unwilling to tell me), at least to remove it from the room for me.
The example of you waving your hands to create light and calling it science would also not stop me until I became convinced that significantly more people than just you knew it and that some of these people would be willing to tell me if I asked. But that’s because my curiosity about the light as a whole would stem as much from mistrust of another person to apply that knowledge to humanity’s general benefit as from real curiosity. You can’t hold out on me with the knowledge that that light can also cure cancer if I also understand what you do about the light, or if I know that a number of other people unlikely to share a stake with you in any enterprise know it.
The real danger would be if that elephant had been in my room since the day I was born and I didn’t know enough to be curious about it.