Curiosity is a drive to know. I love the feeling of being driven to know. It gets you off your butt, right? Metaphorically speaking. Like this kitten at wikipedia which illustrates the curiosity article. The kitten isn’t curled up dozing, it’s on its hind legs peering into the flowerpot. It’s active. Being active is why we’re animals, why we have muscles, so if we lose the drive to activity, it’s like we’re losing the drive to be.
The activity of exploration is very different from the activity of directed activity built around a specific purpose. An example of the latter would be stalking and chasing prey. The animal who is stalking its prey isn’t terribly curious.
Curiosity seems closely allied with play (play often satisfies what-if curiosity, play is often simulation), and play is characterized by lack of important immediate goal (it has the more distant goal of training the animal for life). Play is frivolity, as contrasted to the purposefulness of stalking. Small wonder that both curiosity and play are associated with the young, who are not useful (yet) and who have plenty of time to play, explore, be curious. The adult has no time for these things. Adult behavior is characterized by purpose. Child behavior is characterized by lack of (immediate) purpose. So curiosity seems to stand at an opposite extreme from purposeful behavior, when looked at in this way.
However, the lack of curiosity in the adult is poorly adapted to our rapidly changing world. A lack of adult curiosity is doubtless well-adapted to the largely unchanging world of our distant ancestors, but in this day it’s a liability. So it makes sense to try to cultivate curiosity, play, exploration. We should probably resist our natural tendency to lose curiosity. This may be one situation where we need to struggle against our own nature, just as overweight dieters struggle against their nature, by for example resisting the lure of sugar.
It might not be that easy to cultivate genuine curiosity, just as it’s not easy to ignore sugar.
But here’s hope. I notice that when I read novels, the better writers, the writers whose work I want to read again, are the ones who want make me read what happens next. This criterion may be “low class”, but the point is that the page-turners successfully cultivate the reader’s drive to know, and this is pleasant. Yes, the reader’s brain is being tricked, because the reader isn’t actually learning anything, the novel is all lies, all fantasy. But the psychological point remains, that writers are managing to cultivate in the reader a desire to know. Which suggests that it may be possible to cultivate the desire to know. Literary suspense may not be exactly the same thing as curiosity, but I find it subjectively to be a similar experience, because here too I get off my butt, I make the effort to read more (and for me reading is a struggle if I don’t care about what happens next). The pages fly by when I want to know. Time passes and I don’t notice. I’m not bored.
I would summarize what I think is the most essential insight of your comment as: ‘Curiosity is playful exploration. Chase is directed pursuit. Do not confuse the two’
However, you seem to be too big a fan of curiosity. Most of us intellectually curious types are probably too unconditionally curious for our own good. Your enthusiasm for your favorite novels is a good example. You admit it artificially cultivates in you a desire to know what will happen next, via clever plot trickery. Unfortunately reality and your goals are such that following your curiosity will not lead to information/knowledge with the highest payoff, especially in this modern technical environment, where our ancestrally-adapted curiosity heuristics probably go often astray. Following the smell of curiosity by your nose will lead you to ultimately learn about stuff irrelevant to your goals. It is highly unlikely that the marginally most interesting stuff leads in the direction of greatest marginal expected benefit of new knowledge/info for your achieving your goals. Effective goal pursuit requires crossing valleys of boredom.
I would say curiosity is an investment, and like all good investment it should be targeted, but when you really need/want to get something done, chase.
But curiosity can also be like R&D, and the funding of basic research, which can have huge payoffs that are unexpected compared to what they were originally targeted for.
Curiosity should at times be targeted, but if you are too targeted you can miss a lot of stuff, for example: how things work. Not “a thing”. But “things”, in general. In order to be good at life you need to know a wide variety of things, in order to be able to generate your own overall fabric of how the world works.
But note that R&D, basic research, is unexpected in the sense that we as outsiders don’t know which narrowly focused group will succeed. It is very rare that when some group does succeed that it consists of undisciplined dilettantes pursuing research in an unfocused matter. So it’s a matter of not knowing which research goals have highest payoffs, instead of not knowing which goals you as a researcher are interested in pursuing.
Or think about it this way, the existing social epistemology setup already implements what is necessary to reap the rewards of curiosity on this larger scale. You as an individual researcher, should rather narrow your curiosity to what you are immediately working on.
Being mediocre makes you boring. I am all for interestingness. The optimal curiosity-focus balance for that is somewhere in between.
Curiosity is a drive to know. I love the feeling of being driven to know. It gets you off your butt, right? Metaphorically speaking. Like this kitten at wikipedia which illustrates the curiosity article. The kitten isn’t curled up dozing, it’s on its hind legs peering into the flowerpot. It’s active. Being active is why we’re animals, why we have muscles, so if we lose the drive to activity, it’s like we’re losing the drive to be.
The activity of exploration is very different from the activity of directed activity built around a specific purpose. An example of the latter would be stalking and chasing prey. The animal who is stalking its prey isn’t terribly curious.
Curiosity seems closely allied with play (play often satisfies what-if curiosity, play is often simulation), and play is characterized by lack of important immediate goal (it has the more distant goal of training the animal for life). Play is frivolity, as contrasted to the purposefulness of stalking. Small wonder that both curiosity and play are associated with the young, who are not useful (yet) and who have plenty of time to play, explore, be curious. The adult has no time for these things. Adult behavior is characterized by purpose. Child behavior is characterized by lack of (immediate) purpose. So curiosity seems to stand at an opposite extreme from purposeful behavior, when looked at in this way.
However, the lack of curiosity in the adult is poorly adapted to our rapidly changing world. A lack of adult curiosity is doubtless well-adapted to the largely unchanging world of our distant ancestors, but in this day it’s a liability. So it makes sense to try to cultivate curiosity, play, exploration. We should probably resist our natural tendency to lose curiosity. This may be one situation where we need to struggle against our own nature, just as overweight dieters struggle against their nature, by for example resisting the lure of sugar.
It might not be that easy to cultivate genuine curiosity, just as it’s not easy to ignore sugar.
But here’s hope. I notice that when I read novels, the better writers, the writers whose work I want to read again, are the ones who want make me read what happens next. This criterion may be “low class”, but the point is that the page-turners successfully cultivate the reader’s drive to know, and this is pleasant. Yes, the reader’s brain is being tricked, because the reader isn’t actually learning anything, the novel is all lies, all fantasy. But the psychological point remains, that writers are managing to cultivate in the reader a desire to know. Which suggests that it may be possible to cultivate the desire to know. Literary suspense may not be exactly the same thing as curiosity, but I find it subjectively to be a similar experience, because here too I get off my butt, I make the effort to read more (and for me reading is a struggle if I don’t care about what happens next). The pages fly by when I want to know. Time passes and I don’t notice. I’m not bored.
Excellent!
I would summarize what I think is the most essential insight of your comment as: ‘Curiosity is playful exploration. Chase is directed pursuit. Do not confuse the two’
However, you seem to be too big a fan of curiosity. Most of us intellectually curious types are probably too unconditionally curious for our own good. Your enthusiasm for your favorite novels is a good example. You admit it artificially cultivates in you a desire to know what will happen next, via clever plot trickery. Unfortunately reality and your goals are such that following your curiosity will not lead to information/knowledge with the highest payoff, especially in this modern technical environment, where our ancestrally-adapted curiosity heuristics probably go often astray. Following the smell of curiosity by your nose will lead you to ultimately learn about stuff irrelevant to your goals. It is highly unlikely that the marginally most interesting stuff leads in the direction of greatest marginal expected benefit of new knowledge/info for your achieving your goals. Effective goal pursuit requires crossing valleys of boredom.
I would say curiosity is an investment, and like all good investment it should be targeted, but when you really need/want to get something done, chase.
But curiosity can also be like R&D, and the funding of basic research, which can have huge payoffs that are unexpected compared to what they were originally targeted for.
Curiosity should at times be targeted, but if you are too targeted you can miss a lot of stuff, for example: how things work. Not “a thing”. But “things”, in general. In order to be good at life you need to know a wide variety of things, in order to be able to generate your own overall fabric of how the world works.
Also, being too targeted makes you boring.
But note that R&D, basic research, is unexpected in the sense that we as outsiders don’t know which narrowly focused group will succeed. It is very rare that when some group does succeed that it consists of undisciplined dilettantes pursuing research in an unfocused matter. So it’s a matter of not knowing which research goals have highest payoffs, instead of not knowing which goals you as a researcher are interested in pursuing.
Or think about it this way, the existing social epistemology setup already implements what is necessary to reap the rewards of curiosity on this larger scale. You as an individual researcher, should rather narrow your curiosity to what you are immediately working on.
Being mediocre makes you boring. I am all for interestingness. The optimal curiosity-focus balance for that is somewhere in between.