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

There's a tremendous amount of bad scientific writing as well. Much of induced by publish-or-perish, grant-chasing, and signalling dynamics.

For journalism, relevant, incisive, investigative journalism is gold.

Much of what's written is simple pro-forma, filler, stenography, or worst of all: republished press releases -- APR and VPR (audio / video press release) for radio and television, the original "fake news": https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fake_news

A key question for me is whether the article intends principally to inform rather than persuade or distract. Virtually all current business, "style", entertainment/culture, and big-ticket sales (real estate, autos, travel) "reporting" is thinly veiled advertising. A large fraction of political coverage is either stenography or persuasive rhetoric.

Writing with the reader in mind, or at least with the writer's (or client's) ego / wallet, out of mind, is rare.

> You might ask the people around you, and if they couldn't remember

What I recall is that people around you would remember - but there was a good chance they were remembering incorrectly.

That's the perennial HN question.

Thanks for expanding on your initial thoughts and for relating those expansions to my response. (First rate engagement. A+++ would read again.)

I agree engagement and relational context are orthogonal, and I think your elaboration captures very clearly what I mean by using

> judgement to know when looking up a piece of information is germane to the interpersonal context or whether doing so is incidental

Professor Y clearly cares and that care is expressed by looking up information. My main point to your first comment was that sometimes the nature of a relationship and a meeting will make most citations of fact irrelevant. For sure, sometimes meetings between close relations will benefit from citations of fact.

Reading above, I don't think we're in disagreement, though we may be focusing more tightly on different scenarios.

Thanks for engaging!

Is the problem that we're not curious about the right things? Or is it more that passively wandering through a crap-garden has an astronomically small chance of offering you anything but crap? (Not to put too fine a point on the "crap" thing, because that's not really my point.)

The piece talks about those who read, but elides the free agency of those who offer. Clicking on an article someone offers is not just moving through an unbiased and natural "world" and interacting with it like picking berries off a bush. This world was built by other humans, framed by other humans, who decided what to offer. Behind every article is a human with an agenda and perhaps traffic & revenue targets. If you let them determine what you read, yeah there will tend to be a mismatch. This is not an "opportunistic" approach, it's a "passive" approach.

Let's say we were talking about pizza instead. You want pizza. Do you go wandering around hoping someone offers you pizza? Pretty sure if you don't already know where to get pizza, you go look up pizza. But then are you like "Oh but there are 'thousands of hits' for pizza, boo hoo?!" No, that is what success at finding pizza looks like. Sorting out which one is your favorite pizza, the one that's just right for you from all those many options is like, the least amount of work you can frigging do. It's fortunate-people problems.

If you're curious about something, this author was right the first time: Just look it up. First hit is almost always Wikipedia, which is fine. Start reading, and you're off to the races. They even have hyperlinks to all related terms/concepts that might need explication or that you might be, ahem, curious about. Yep it takes some minimal amount of will and discipline to read and click links and direct your own learning. If you can't muster that, you're kind of in trouble. But do it anyway; practicing will make you stronger.