Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About?

There's a saying that having a typewriter on a desk is not the sign of a writer, it's a sign of someone who wants to present the image of a writer, to feel like a writer but without the hard bit of having to labour over writing something, to be seen as a writer.[1]

LessWrong talks about "Science as attire"[2] thus: "The X-Men comics use terms like “evolution,” “mutation,” and “genetic code,” purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the literary genre of science.", and TheLastPsychiatrist wrote endlessly about narcissism in modern society - caring about our image and how others perceive us and how we control how we seem, over and above taking action and doing things (for others).

When the article said "I want to be drawn in by the nature of quasars", these things are what came to mind; maybe the author finds the idea of being curious about the subject cool; maybe the author wants to feel and appear smart and Quasars fit that image a lot more than popular macaroon flavours do. Yet Quasars have the difficult part of needing to read papers about radio astronomy and study masters degree level math, probably.

This has been a bitter, hard to learn, and not very thoroughly learned lesson in my life, and I feel a pang of identification with the author on that note. How much cooler and cleverer does their article look for their claim "I want to be curious about Quasars" instead of had they written "I want to be curious about cardboard glue" - and yet does the substance of the article change at all for any value of X in "I want to be curious about X"? I think it doesn't, I think only the image changes. It's name-dropping Quasars.

It's the Richard Feynman vignette[3] about learning the names of a bird in different languages from his father, and then being shown that afterwards he knows nothing - but nothing - about the bird, and that being important in his focus on detail and how things behave, rather than studying names and descriptions.

At least the author can dodge to macaroon articles and still feel like they are learning and feel superior to another version of themselves where they just stared at the wall - reading is cleverer than doing nothing. Even when the thing they read is irrelevant, forgettable, flashy but insubstantial, disconnected from their knowledge. Why can't they simply say "I read about macaroon flavours because it was there and caught my eye"? Because that sounds weak and stupid.

> This function of curiosity — to heighten memory — is the key to understanding why we’re curious about some things and not others. We feel most curious when exploration will yield the most learning. [..] We’re maximally curious when we sense that the environment offers new information in the right proportion to complement what we already know.

Do we? How did the Alcatraz Menu fit into this claim?

My much less cheerful answer is that the author doesn't want to be curious about Quasars (radio telescope measurements and calculations made from them and mathematical models built from those), the author wants to be seen as someone interested in science (but not the nerdy topics which would bore a polite dinner party, only something popular and safely irrelevant), and is feeling shameful and inadequate about clicking on an Alcatraz menu. NB. I say ashamed at reading trivia because it's not smart enough for the image the author wants to portray, deliberately not guilty at the waste of time which could have been spent helping others instead. The Alcatraz menu was interesting, so the time was 'well spent' by some metric, so the author isn't unhappy with low productivity or bad use of time, the author is specifically unhappy at the use of time not being up to the image they want to portray to the world. "People would think I'm stupid if they knew what I was reading about, so I'd better dress it up in a NYT opinion piece then I can feel and look smart again". (I accuse).

[1] The sign of a writer is some writing - output from the act of writing - be it on typewriter or pen and paper or computer, etc.

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as...

[3] Richard Feynman anecdote in an interview https://youtu.be/GNhlNSLQAFE?t=240

[4]

It reminds me of that sienfeld episode where George says he always wanted to be a civil war buff.

The article is interesting and raises a good point, but I don't think it really solves anything.

With the right perspective on (understanding of) your mental processes, deep, useful, questions like this cease to exist. They are solved. I've had success recently with subtle self-control over curiosity and motivation, and the way to do it is just as simple as it intuitively feels.

Reconfiguring your brain to follow through on your stated goals is a simple process over time that relies on simple goal-setting and reward. You set up a system of trivial goals, always at whatever pace you enjoy, and expand their novelty and risk factor. Being very simple and increasingly binary, this process can easily crystallize in your physical brain. Yet it is ever expanding in complexity as you become excited at your progress in broadening intelligence.

This is the kind of thing that some will want evidence for. Those are the ones that won't be able to make use of it. Follow intuition; only you can convince your inner self of truth in progress. Science is only a semi-precise tool for helping this process, as the controls of any experiment are infinite in reality.

BTW, the comment on Novelty Seeking was great hos234!

How worthy is it /really/ for a psychologist to read up on quasars?

I think anthropology has a lot to say about how we tailless monkeys intuitively behave in modern complex civilization.