Exploration / exploitation. After decades of asking “why?” you should have a decent model of the world, so that you can finally start acting on it. (If you keep asking “why?” forever, you become a smart procrastinator.)
Also, sometimes people are lying to you, so it makes sense to refuse further learning after you already believe you got your model generally right. Or some religious people may keep wasting your time by giving you more and more books to read… so there are just three possible outcomes: giving up, playing the game forever and wasting your time, or refusing to further investigate.
The specific trade-offs probably depend on IQ and general education (having good priors). Like, if you are stupid, you will get less benefits from keeping asking “why?”.
I think a pattern that makes sense to me is cycles of exploration and exploitation: learn about the world, act on that understanding, use the observations you acquired from acting to guide further learning, etc. The world is big and complicated enough that I think you don’t hit anything close to diminishing marginal returns on asking “why?” (my experience, if anything, has been increasing marginal returns as I’ve gotten better at learning things), although I agree that it’s important to get some acting going on in there too.
Exploration / exploitation. After decades of asking “why?” you should have a decent model of the world, so that you can finally start acting on it. (If you keep asking “why?” forever, you become a smart procrastinator.)
Also, sometimes people are lying to you, so it makes sense to refuse further learning after you already believe you got your model generally right. Or some religious people may keep wasting your time by giving you more and more books to read… so there are just three possible outcomes: giving up, playing the game forever and wasting your time, or refusing to further investigate.
The specific trade-offs probably depend on IQ and general education (having good priors). Like, if you are stupid, you will get less benefits from keeping asking “why?”.
I think a pattern that makes sense to me is cycles of exploration and exploitation: learn about the world, act on that understanding, use the observations you acquired from acting to guide further learning, etc. The world is big and complicated enough that I think you don’t hit anything close to diminishing marginal returns on asking “why?” (my experience, if anything, has been increasing marginal returns as I’ve gotten better at learning things), although I agree that it’s important to get some acting going on in there too.
I agree, but this probably wasn’t true in our ancient evolutionary environment.