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.
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.