I haven’t yet read the posts you suggest, but your answer seems really convincing. I guess ‘knowing stuff’, ‘sitting there doing nothing but reading popular science books’, were more rewarded than ‘actually being smart/actually taking the risk of possibly being wrong’, so I did mostly the former, at least as a child and young student. And, weird as it sounds, I guess my first years of uni did the same thing: what was really rewarded then was knowing as many cool examples to put in an essay as possible, while ‘rationality’, ‘scientific evidence’, etc. were kind of discouraged. Looking back at it, I see that there was some pruning in my interests, in the kind of books I’d read, etc. Might have been a similar pruning of what my brain lets me do, for all I know. Seems really odd, as it would mean I’ve been sort of traumatized by my early college years? But consistent with what I’ve sometimes been ranting about. Will look into all of that.
Thanks a lot for your very interesting comment, by the way!
I haven’t yet read the posts you suggest, but your answer seems really convincing. I guess ‘knowing stuff’, ‘sitting there doing nothing but reading popular science books’, were more rewarded than ‘actually being smart/actually taking the risk of possibly being wrong’, so I did mostly the former, at least as a child and young student. And, weird as it sounds, I guess my first years of uni did the same thing: what was really rewarded then was knowing as many cool examples to put in an essay as possible, while ‘rationality’, ‘scientific evidence’, etc. were kind of discouraged. Looking back at it, I see that there was some pruning in my interests, in the kind of books I’d read, etc. Might have been a similar pruning of what my brain lets me do, for all I know. Seems really odd, as it would mean I’ve been sort of traumatized by my early college years? But consistent with what I’ve sometimes been ranting about. Will look into all of that.
Thanks a lot for your very interesting comment, by the way!