If you never question something, no matter how small or insignificant, you aren't really living but just....existing!!
Don't be a sheep like everybody else!!!
For example, it seems that this is the trend in modern academia and science, where huge amounts of resources are used to pursue knowledge that wouldn't make sense if it weren't incentivized the way it is.
Most academics will admit that, despite their own curiosity, their actual output has almost nothing to do with curiosity. Nor are grants awarded based on curiosity, because that's really hard to measure.
We know HN is all about curiosity. But my addiction to it, if you call it that, has nothing to do with curiosity-- except that last bit in TFA about the invulnerability
I come for the curiosity, but I stay to feel ... vulnerable? Comfortable? Invulnerable? Fuck knows.
It's probably related to the "fact" that dopamine hits come from anticipation of reward rather than reward.. curiousity spikes once a couple of weeks on HN and that's too regular and sparse to get addicted to. Do people get addicted to buying lottery tickets? Unless the tickets smell really great, that seems unlikely. It's more of a compulsion.. thus even less related to curiosity.
I don't know about the other addicts. Eg those here who average 20-100s karma per comment maybe they do know how to scale curiosity, and that is a GOOD thing, no question about it.
I'd say "surprising" is less Goodharted. 50% of surprising is roughly delightful to 50% of the people. (The other 50% is dreadful. Like say South Carolina turned blue. Surprising, but dreadful to 50% of their electorate)
"Curious" is even harder to measure than "surprising".. BUT maybe you can say, "potential for further or bigger surprise". Curiosity has something of a second order, a potentiality, a promise, a good promise. Is hope good for us? Is optimism? That's roughly the same order of question
(I'm aware that the article is talking about curiosity as a sort of skill. To me, it is. But folks tend to focus on curiosity as a trait, because that's seemingly more debatable. And ironically, just as the article feared, can defo threaten their identity)
We could send a ship and a crew out to Big Ben and ask Rorsach.
Fantastic book. Mind-bending scifi that really makes you think about consciousness, imo
I would argue something that helps you know yourself can only be a net positive, otherwise you're just being pushed around by forces you haven't even pinned down and put a name to. You're the cannon fodder of manipulative forces.
The same thing turns up at a societal level. There is a profound question of whether truth and human society are compatible. In some hypothetical universal truth sense, maybe the right thing for humans to do is pack up and end the species. Maybe there is something that looks a lot like a universal truth that implies that, but isn't and we wouldn't realise it fast enough to avoid doing something stupid. We don't (can't, really) know what the outcome of inquiry would be. That suggests that if anyone has any values at all then it is possible for them to conflict with curiosity because curiosity may undermine them.
It would be like physicists constantly including references/comparisons to Aristotelian Mechanics, or flat Earthers.
Why put any consideration or thought into something known-to-be completely wrong? I can't comprehend it. For me, it completely discredits anything they're trying to say. Maybe there was something interesting, I don't know, I gave up after I saw 25 hits for "Freud". I don't enjoy pseudoscience.
1. Someone else who isn't you figured out how wrong Freud was.
2. What is considered "intuitive" changes over time because of those questions you never had to consider and the answers that you now do.
The less curious you are about the past, the more likely you are to repeat its mistakes. Do not consider yourself immune. It's the people who are as dismissive as you are that are most highly at risk!
And the torture ends!
I don't believe it's necessary to go into depth about all the ideas that were wrong, through all of history.
It's hard to dodge totally a figure that the discipline itself sell as a founding member or a representative of what is antinomic to these foundations yet enjoy some persistent followers.
You mean things like:
* people not being fully rational, but also having unconscious thought processes
* human mind consisting of multiple sub-agents that sometimes have different goals
* hypnosis not being necessary to cure problems, mere talking can achieve the same effect
* sex being an important force in human psychology
...or something else specifically?
When talking about people in the past, you may want to consider that everything they were right about sounds to us now as obvious (sometimes, thanks to them), so yeah it seems like everyone in the past only had two kinds of opinions: obvious, and wrong.
I just stop reading when I stumble on a piece seriously mentioning Freud as an authority.
And was there a book review hiding beneath all that noxious palaver? TL-DR. I'd genuinely like to know. Curiosity deserves better inquiry and illumination than the few books I've seen on the topic.