

The Economics of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid  - cwan
http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/03/14/the-economics-of-butch-cassidy-and-the-sundance-kid/

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MikeCapone
Posts like this make the internet just a tiny bit more awesome. It reminded me
of how great that movie was and at the same time made me see aspects of it
that I had not thought about during previous viewings. thanks!

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raganwald
And if I may offer the inverse of the lamentable "Not Hacker News" type of
comment, posts like this are exactly why Hacker News is a particularly awesome
corner of the internet. If anyone wants to know what it means to "Gratify
one's intellectual curiosity," this type of post is it.

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statictype
Alright, I've heard this phrase many times around here.

What is _intellectual_ curiosity? How is it different from just curiosity in
general? What does the "intellectual" qualifier bring to the statement?

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raganwald
I have no idea how to define it! I can give some examples of what it is and
what it isn't, in my opinion. For example, anything that kind of shakes up my
worldview of how something works is usually it. Gossip about which tech
personality is an asshole SEO arbitrageur is usually not it.

I'm reminded of a story I read in one of Smullyan's books. A teacher is giving
a mathematics lesson, and he gives the students a problem: "Prove that such-
and-such is so-and-so. Any questions?" One of the students raises his hand.
"Sir, what is a proof? How do we know whether a proof is any good or not?"

It turns out that although the idea of a proof is relatively easy to grok and
to use, proving whether something is a proof or not is extraordinarily
difficult. The story comes to mind for two reasons: First, because
"intellectual curiosity" is like "proof," easy to grok but difficult to define
precisely. And second, because now you've piqued my intellectual curiosity: Is
it possible to write a program that does a good job of flagging off-topic
stories?

