Amusing that this starts with a dismissal of the utility of fiction. Stories can be a powerful way of communicating subtle cultural artifacts and historical distinctions. Death of intellectual curiosity, indeed.
Interpreting it generously, the author was more focused on the fact that the imaginary strawman he was referring to didn't read anything besides number one bestselling thrillers. Emphasis on best-selling as much as on thrillers. This illustrates a lack of intellectual curiosity, because this person doesn't seek out challenging books, they just read what's popular and what they already know they'll like.
Remember that the focus of the article is on curiosity, not just on acquiring new information.
Fiction isn't a waste of time, but you can't say it is intellectually interesting compared to science.
You can read about magical physics in science fiction books or you can read about real physics in science books. The later is much more interesting than the former, there is no comparison. There is a middle ground in PopSci, still not as interesting as real physics but better than science fiction books.
>Fiction isn't a waste of time, but you can't say it is intellectually interesting compared to science.
I am of the camp that real physics is far more interesting than fiction to me personally, and I crack open textbooks far more often than works of fiction.
However, I must opine that to say that fiction isn't as intellectually interesting compared to science probably speaks more to your own lack of understanding of the subject of fiction than to fiction itself.
Fiction is far from a settled science! There is tremendous room for creativity. Many competing mental models for how to compose a story, character, the prose itself, how literary themes should interact, etc. etc. What makes a best-seller different from a mediocre book? An endless number of things that can be dissected, experimented with and evolved.
And that's to say nothing about the concepts that can be toyed with through fiction and stories. Setting up a fictitious universe and exploring the consequences of that setup is not so different from asking the 'what if' questions assuming certain mathematical axioms or different sets of physical laws and symmetries.
This is a bit of straw man because the author is specifically dismissing certain genres of fiction like romance and thrillers, rather than fiction as a whole.
It's hard to argue that books like The Da Vinci Code, as much I enjoy them, deliver the same sort of commentary on the human condition as something like 1984.
What about fiction like American Psycho, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Pride and Prejudice, or The Tempest? Do they not deliver social commentary on the human condition that equals (or maybe even surpasses) 1984? Are you equally dismissive of thrillers and romantic films? Is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy vapid? Was Titanic a froofy waste of film?
I did not call anything vapid nor a waste of time, nor would I, personally, make the same claim as the article author that any sort of literature is without value to society.
My point is that the author of the article was a criticizing a specific category of book, so any counter-argument against that criticism should also be specifically about that form. Just saying "fiction as a whole is valuable" seems both obviously true and not relevant to the discussion.
I mean we have a word for those books. Books of literary fiction are worth reading.
Which is a tautological statement since literary fiction is just a term snobs who don’t read fiction invented for “books that have special artistic merit so I’ll read them even if they’re fiction”.
I think it's also worth mentioning that the author is specifically criticizing the motivation of it being #1 on NYT's best seller list (or a similarly vapid thing).
I guess there is this line (emphasis mine), which is suggestive of all fiction but, to use your examples, I'm not convinced the author would attribute it to 1984 the same they would to The Da Vinci Code.
> There is nothing wrong with reading these kinds of books, but you do not learn anything new (besides who committed the murder).
I think it's less about what you read, but rather how you read it. If you aren't actively trying to challenge yourself with your reading, you're probably not going to learn much from it. You can read easily read 1984 as a thriller, which I suspect is why you get all these bad takes about how "something I dislike anyways" is like 1984.
I have trouble with both genres being dismissed as not serious or intellectually engaging etc. being two of the ones with predominantly female readership.
I don't think they are necessarily dismissing fiction as a whole; rather it seems they are dismissing what they see as the shallowest form of reading - reading only fiction and even then only books that are most likely written to be as appealing and captivating as possible without necessarily having much deep content.
fiction carries lots of falsehoods tho. If you actually 'learn' from fiction and try to apply it to real life, that's usually a bad thing. A silly example is Naruto running - it doesn't make you faster, or cooler, yet a few humans sincerely Naruto run in public. And if you can't learn from fiction, and it's possible to learn BAD things from it - what's it for? Fiction is guilty until proven innocent for me.
Something doesn't have to be factual to be true. And not all factual things are true either. Lying with facts is very easy – texas sharpshooter fallacy for example. And telling deep truths is easier with non-factual stories – 1984 for example.
"It is now easier to understand all major theories than it was in ancient times."
I loled and stopped at this point.
Perhaps the author really does understand GR and the Standard Model to a deep professional level. Or even "simple" domains like machine learning, music theory, political science, biochemistry, or visual aesthetics.
I learned WAY more after school (but a lot of this could be tied to my graduating in the early 2000s, when the internet was exploding with new forms of self expression and had not yet become completely dominated by algorithms and corporate capture). The problem with learning broadly is that eventually all the easy to grasp and explain, but stimulating and powerful ideas eventually become known. Then you either become interested in learning more obscure trivia, delving deep into a particular field (which is fine, but you've got to pick where to specialize) or instead prioritize other things.
Many people who spent a lot of time focused on learning decide that spending a bit more time on physical health is more important. Many have far less time as they raise families. Others determine that putting forth effort to more clearly express the ideas and knowledge they value (whether through discussion or art) is their duty, to make it easier for others to follow, and then perhaps take the baton further.
I spent a lot of time changing my mind about things because I listened and learned so much. I'm still open to doing so, but sadly, after a point you are so much more informed than "the average person" that there's diminishing returns to seeking out alternative views and opinions. And don't even get me started on the "Just read this four thousand page book" recommendation that some people make.
School and college creates a platform that you can put other knowledge on. The stuff you put on that platform afterwards might look like a mountain, but your platform wouldn't support a large mountain if you didn't make it wide and stable to begin with.
Intellectual curiosity could be said to want to expand that platform instead of just putting more things on top of it, putting things on top is the default, expanding the platform is done by very few which is why forcing them to spend years in education is so important.
i feel you bro.
its easy to understand other peoples point of view and at the same time seeing what their viewpoint misses. again beeing aware that myself is limited too.
it thought me beeing empathic with everybody but beeing able to say not my point of view. i guess its called becoming wise.
since its a pattern of aging which you can do ofcause with different style, i recommend reading into anthroposophical-biography-work to understand the patterns of human morphing thru life.
I am happy that I was blessed to learn about it. Now over 50 I still can recommend digging into it.
Best age is around mid 30 to grasp what's ahead.
E.g.
What an insipid, jejune bad take. Not sure which I hate more -- the author's smugness or the tired tropes supported by cringe-worthy assaults on straw-men.
I know what I hate the most. It is that while the author does start out with a good topic - "why don't people do intellectual curiosity and lifelong learning?" - they then somehow manage to promptly come to the very worst possible conclusion. They even cite the cause of the problem as a potential solution!
>a free market for universities–and more generally for education—where the consumers decide the value of a service [...] where students don’t pay upfront for their education, but afterward and only if they get a high paying job.
It's that attitude right there that is the very root of the problem! There are tons of fascinating topics people could study and would enjoy learning, but since everyone's so laser focused on that paycheck and getting a high paying job, they don't. Anything that doesn't serve that purpose gets cut. As if education is pointless, only job training matters. And only those profits from "skin in the game," never mind any actual education, learning, or intellectual curiosity.
It's really so incredibly backwards that I have a strong suspicion it might have been intended as a troll post.
Professor do not only "talk," as the article states. He might be confusing them with instructors. Professors with research responsibilities, often 1/3rd to >50% of their duties, are "publish or perish". My professor was still publishing at age 78, and a European colleague of his moved to the U.S. because his country mandates retirement. https://iotmote.substack.com/p/a-tribute-to-carl-woese
Hell, I started working in an entirely new field this year because I was curious about it - in addition to my current research agenda, which is 75% of my job responsibilities - because I was curious.
And because I read a book this author would dismiss as not being sufficiently august.
Reality itself has become deeply concealed. Most of our products come from overseas, so we dont see how stuff is made or who makes it; where do we get the experience of being curious from in high consumerism? Electronics fill a vast amount of the things in the world, are a primary meams of reaction g activatiom, and yet their functioning is concealled behind software protection & IP, with few development tools available.
The modern world refuses the idea of the microscope, rejects the core truth that underlied the Enlightenment values: there's no point to enlightenment in a universe which is unobservable, where we dont have a way to investigate. The modern world too strongly represents that infernal anti-Human hellscape. And alas, it is only ourselves who are resppnsible for this fall.
Internet has changed that. We may not see them practically but we do see them on videos, tiktoks and so on. Just search for life in village videos related to specific country. That content is there. It depends if youtube algo prioritizes those for others.
Dismissing social science as a hindrance to intellectual curiosity while stating that Karl Poppper's falsificationism is the foundation of modern science is extremely ironic. Being intellectually curious means charitably reading topics one disdains, and a consequence of that is knowing that Popper's views on science is simply one perspective of many.
The pragmatism of coping with poverty probably plays a big role in losing ones motivation for curiosity. It is hard to let yourself waste time traveling down rabbit holes when you are worried about paying your bills.
What are the bastions of curiosity today? I'm always on the lookout for these. I would say HN is on net. I've heard Cambridge tends to be that way. Working at Ycombinator seems like it would be that way. I've heard Google used to be that way (maybe still is?)
People often complain that the JS world moves too fast and has too many frameworks. To me, bountiful boundary-pushing creations is the very smell of a creative community.
The problem with the ever-shifting tools in the JS world is that it more resembles a bad case of obsessive compulsive home remodelling disorder than a quest for a better tech infrastructure. There just is not that much to be curious about when the outcome is already known up-front: wherever this new framework decides to place the sofa and whatever trendy posters it places on the walls they're sure to come down and be moved during the next remodelling.
Creative developers makes their own frameworks for their apps, Javascript is different with how much people choose to depend upon new libraries all the time instead of solving simple problems themselves.
Eh, I agree with your overall sentiment; but I cannot think of a worse example than the Javascript community. While there are genuine innovations being made, they aren't common and they rarely require the introduction of a new framework or library. When I think 'JS world' I immediately think of Sturgeon's Law (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)
The rationality community I'd say is very curious, on the whole - see astral codex ten, marginal revolution, lesswrong, etc
Regardless of what you think of them it's hard to argue they aren't curious
Generally, any group making stuff that somehow hangs together even without profit motive.
They make stuff--so they can't just only be "social". The group continues to exist--so people find it interesting enough to continue joining. It's not making a profit, so the group has to have something of worth beyond pure monetary value.
The big problem right now is simply finding those groups because they often aren't advertising themselves.
The only HAM radio guys I've ever come across (to be fair, as support/sales for a USB Oscilloscope) have been incredibly interested in and passionate about the theory and culture behind citizen band radio.
I remember one of the guys, with no prompting, sharing a map with me showing that there was something like a 2 byte/second emergency radio link between wherever he was and Melbourne.
> they rarely read books. Even if they do, they read the thriller or romance novel which is currently number one on the NYT bestseller list.
And...?
> There is nothing wrong with reading these kinds of books, but you do not learn anything new (besides who committed the murder).
Once again, and...?
Why does everyone seem to have this continuous growth mindset, where, if you're not growing in some capacity you're failing at life? I love reading fiction, and I love reading non fiction. I don't particularly enjoy reading textbooks every waking moment, and that's fine.
Besides the fact that entertainment and relaxation are necessary parts of staying sane enough and having enough context to absorb new information properly, the OP's claim isn't even true. Many bestsellers include copious amounts of information as background - history, culture, even technology. Often that's why they are bestsellers. Try reading Name of the Rose or Hunt for Red October without learning anything. Yes, there's also a lot of trashy fiction that really does contain nothing new, but the author's overgeneralization and outright stereotyping are the very antithesis of intellectual curiosity.
I agree that intellectual curiosity seems to taper off after a certain point. I don't really blame this on the education system specifically, as he does. I think at a certain point in their lives human beings just tend to find their rut and continue in it. I observe this across different countries, and throughout history, so I conclude that's it's largely biological, though I grant you the environment may contribute to it.
I disagree with the bit about simplicity existing on the other side of complexity. Nothing in my life has turned out that way: I find mountains on the other side of mountains. Everything I learn a lot about just leads to more complexity. Maybe that means I've never gotten over the hump of the distribution, but there are at least a couple things I'm considered an "expert" in, and it's just as (if not more) true in those domains.
I've lived long enough and been around children enough to know that the curiosity of most children only goes so far. The existence of the phrase "curiosity killed the cat" implies to me that we feel there should be limits to curiosity because sometimes it's good to leave well enough alone.
Some kids won't listen and continue to ask questions until they achieve some understanding they seek. These kids usually remain curious through out life. I am not convinced this percentage is declining. I'd expect it to increase, but now even moderately curious children have access to a wealth of information and ideas over the internet that will spark more curiosity in them.
intellectual curiosity doesnt keep you up with the Joneses,
at least not immediately or maybe ever because the payoff is perhaps not there at all.
There are very few people who do stuff for the sake of doing stuff. If you are a volunteer you’d know because basically there is always a shortage of them, never once a volunteer has been turned down at least I never saw it
My experience from volunteer organizations is the opposite. To exaggerate a bit, every volunteer organization has exactly as many volunteers as there is room for.
People don't volunteer because they want a boss tell them how to spend their free time. They volunteer because they want to do something meaningful in the way they prefer.
Volunteers want autonomy. If you can't provide it, there is no room for new people in your organization. To attract more volunteers, you often have to restructure the organization and change the ways things are done. And sometimes you have to get rid of existing volunteers, because they have too dominating personalities, are too toxic, or are too attached to the old ways.
Turning down volunteers is quite common in successful organizations.
Most of the time, being autodidactic doesn’t get you very far.
At the beginning you may be progressing really fast and it’s all fun and games until you hit a plateau.
At that point you need a teacher, a mentor, or a guide to give you structure and planning and highlight which subjects are important, otherwise it will take you 10x the time to get there.
There was a time when making people more connected was seen as an unqualified good thing. No, really. And it does still have some upsides, such as connecting people with rare interests or conditions, or enabling members of marginalized groups to support each other. But we're also hyper-aware nowadays of its downside - conspiracy theories, actual conspiracies, stalking and invasion of privacy. Maybe on balance it's still good, but it does plenty of harm as well.
Same thing with information. We've turned a problem of access into one of curation. Disinformation is a serious problem, no matter which side of any particular issue you think represents truth. Along with real information we get flooded with clickbait, manufactured outrage, influencer nonsense. Some of these cause far more psychological damage than their minimal information content could justify. Again, the good is there but there's also plenty of harm.
The solution most emphatically is not the kind of intellectual nihilism (misrepresented as curiosity) of the OP. That's just "believe whatever you want" nonsense wrapped in pretension. What's needed is better education about how to separate the wheat from the chaff - a skill most people quite demonstrably do not learn for themselves. It's like putting a first-time driver who can barely see over the wheel right onto the trickiest freeway interchange you can think of. By denying the value of education - by which I mean education guided by someone who understands the scientific principles of pedagogy - we're also denying people the very tools they need to survive. Once they can do that, then we can set them loose with some confidence that they will fill their heads with signal instead of noise.
> a skill most people quite demonstrably do not learn for themselves.
Citation needed. I'm pretty sure that the people who take conspiracy theories and urban legends seriously are a tiny minority, same as they always were. The Internet has just made this stuff more visible, not more common.
Depends on what you consider a conspiracy theory - it doesn't have to be QAnon level to qualify - and that's not the only problem anyway. If you've ever studied information warfare, you'd know that it's not necessarily about making people believe one specific thing. More often it's about making people uncertain, creating/heightening conflict, or just getting people to disengage out of sheer fatigue. It's paralysis, not a kill. Even when IW is not involved, it's reflected in "both sides" and "voting doesn't matter" and "choose your own science" (not in so many words but absolutely rampant right here) and calling people "sheep" and so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam. Do you really need me to cite examples? Do you really believe the quality of public discourse has not degraded over the time social media have become ascendant, or that people weren't easily fooled even before? Are you asking because you're actually curious, or because you already believe the contrary and it's easier to make demands of others than of yourself? "I'm pretty sure" the answer is clear.
> Do you really believe the quality of public discourse has not degraded over the time social media have become ascendant, or that people weren't easily fooled even before?
Previous generations had TV mainlined into their brains.
a big part thats missing from the list is the inherent hyperconsumerism in neoliberal capitalist societies.
For example: in the past 60 years the trope of nerds and geeks being inferior and unliked served an important purpose: it prevented intellectual curiousity from supplanting dominant structures of planned obsolescence and reinforced a culture of disposable and unquestioning consumption. Dont open the iPad, dont hack the Tivo, and for god sake ignore every electron in your car. to do otherwise may void the warranty.
fast forward to 2022 and the US is scrambling to undo this trainwreck before China and most of the developed world reduce us to a wholly dependent subsidiary of their largest conglomerates. Unfortunately its happening in the most ham-fisted and desperate effort ever imagined. Big Bang theory? nerds are cool now kids, make sure to be a nerd. Code.org? codes cool now kids, go learn code. Raspberry pi's for everyone until there are none left, but remember not to hack or question your proprietary courseware in class now, and enjoy those locked down spyware laptops. Learn!(tm) be curious(tm)
Consumerism has done everything possible to kneecap intellectual curiousity. DMCA? DRM? secure boot? signed firmware, version locks and region locks and nearly every millimeter of most game consoles are a baron wasteland of "dont touch, only consume." hell, even obfuscated script on websites could be seen as actively working to subvert any sort of personal interest in favour of harvesting as much data about the consumer as possible. and if you do have curiousity? expect a youtube-dl style response until the very corporate overlords that depend upon your intellect to survive capitulate and grudgingly shrug off consumerism for the femtosecond it takes to reinstate your project.
It suggest that all people are intellectually curious as children, after which this curiosity is destroyed in the education system.
It provides zero evidence for this sweeping conclusion. Education not being very fun and not very personalized does not prove that intellectual curiosity is wiped out.
Anybody whom has spent any time with children or are old enough to see a child develop into a full grown adult would have noticed the dramatic individual differences in their behavior and abilities, many likely to be genetic. All children are curious to a degree, which quite simply is a biological necessity to understand how this world works. But deep curiosity for curiosity's sake, for no immediate purpose: only found in specific individuals. They just seem to be born with it.
To illustrate how large individual differences can be, meet my family.
Father. Poor upbringing. Life long blue collar worker. Near-zero education. Has read about 50% of all the books in the town's library. Born intellectually curious and remains so against all odds.
Mother. Housewife with some past side jobs. Lowly educated. Zero intellectual curiosity. Watches a soap opera and reads a gossipy mag, and you can't get her interested in anything else. She has low capacity to do so, furthermore is anxious and scared of anything new. She's always been this way.
Brother. Grunt worker like my father but with the intellectual limitations of my mother. A mix of the two. Again, has always been this way.
Me. Intellectually curious like my father, with some soft sides from my mother. Tinkerer from the very start.
Girlfriend. Perhaps most painful. Intelligent and educated. But not intellectually curious. The education system didn't discourage it, she simply never was intellectually curious.
Where a small sample size is usually a shortcoming in providing any evidence, here I'd make the point that the incredible diversity in outcomes of such a small sample size illustrates my point: you're intellectually curious or you're not.
Some simply lack the capacity to be that curious. Some do have the capacity but still don't use it. Some can be convinced to use it, by force or incentive. And for some it's completely effortless and just whom you are.
The idea that we all are (as children) is nonsense. The idea that the education system wipes this out, is nonsense.
But if I were to give the author the benefit of the doubt on this part, it is absolutely destroyed in the libertarian take on free market education. So the idea here is that universities should go bankrupt if they fail to deliver the student a high paying job.
So you put businesses in the driving seat of "intellectual curiosity" and life long learning. Businesses. You can't be serious. There can't be any entity that cares less.
The connections between concepts seem completely random and made-up.
