Hacker News

Is Curiosity Good for Us?(lrb.co.uk)

52 points by NaOH 4 days ago | 34 comments

[–] h4kunamata 3 days ago

It is a must!

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!!!

[–] psychoslave 3 days ago

That looks very interesting to go read it, but on the other hand who knows where this curiosity might lead to?!

[–] bemtevi 3 days ago

It's obvious that it is. But I think it's also obvious that one can follow curiosity pathologically and have curiosity rewarded to the point that it becomes harmful. Even information can be addictive to the point that we pursue curiosity beyond a healthy level - or in other words to the point that we ignore other things like simplicity and minimalism.

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.

[–] oliculipolicula 3 days ago

Empirically, curiosity doesn't scale. By my own estimate,99% of the information or anything really, that an addict ingests has no "intrinsic value".

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.

[–] nukular 3 days ago

Yeah, I think the question should be “is novelty good for us?” Curiosity begins with attraction to what is “novel.” And novel does not equal meaningfully satisfying.

[–] oliculipolicula 3 days ago

"Novel" is easy to measure, it's now thoroughly Goodharted; only 1% of what's now called novel seems to be attractive to the median human. (how many submissions are there to HNovels everyday, vs how many you'd actually read?)

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)

[–] GolfPopper 3 days ago

"What would make someone, anyone, phobic of their curiosity? What might be endangering about curiosity?"

We could send a ship and a crew out to Big Ben and ask Rorsach.

[–] dmbche 3 days ago

You warm my heart

[–] NooneAtAll5 3 days ago

explain?

[–] shoobiedoo 3 days ago

It's a reference to the SciFi book Blindsight about humans who leave earth after it is surrounded by a matrix of extraterrestrial objects. Rorschach is another 'alien' vessel they try to communicate with in the Oort cloud (big ben).

Fantastic book. Mind-bending scifi that really makes you think about consciousness, imo

[–] eighty8days 3 days ago

I need to be curious in order to do my job correctly. If I don't, then I'm neglegent. Sure there's probably some instances where curiosity could lead someone to their demise, but for the vast majority of people, why wouldn't it be a good thing?

[–] oliculipolicula 3 days ago

Do you mean any job, or just your job? What is your job?

[–] neuralkoi 3 days ago

> What Freud, like everyone else, cannot promise or even suggest is that our curiosity is always good for us, or on the side of our happiness or our health. The curiosity that the psychoanalytic method facilitates is always of ambiguous moral and emotional value.

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.

[–] bookofjoe 3 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50367737

[–] roenxi 3 days ago

The essay is long and could do with a summary version (hurrah for AI). I get the impression it missed some of the big worries about curiosity - you can be curious and explore things that are terrible ideas. For example, being curious about what it feels like to gouge your own eyes out with a rusty spoon - legitimate question but not something that a healthy human should want to be feeling emotionally or exploring practically. There is a spectrum of healthy and unhealthy curiosity.

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.

[–] nomel 3 days ago

I don't understand psychologists interest in Freud, someone who was completely and entirely objectively wrong about everything.

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.

[–] sublinear 3 days ago

You're taking two massive things for granted.

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!

[–] nomel 3 days ago

This is all a self inflicted wound though. Weeks are still spent on him, and his pseudoscience, in intro psychology classes, and still brought up in higher level courses. People only know about him because psychologists won't stop talking about him. Here's one sentence that could be used to stop the cycle, any time a desire to talk about Freud comes up: Freud introduced the concept of psychoanalysis, but his framework and findings are in no way relevant to science, so will be left to the reader.

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.

[–] psychoslave 2 days ago

Physicists and epistemologs do refer to Aristotle and flat earthers all the time. Maybe with more critical mindset and as a will to exemplify what they consider undesirable outcomes, but still they cite them all the time.

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.

[–] Viliam1234 16 hours ago

> completely and entirely objectively wrong about everything.

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.

[–] rudolftheone 3 days ago

This.

I just stop reading when I stumble on a piece seriously mentioning Freud as an authority.

[–] randcraw 3 days ago

Amen. I too am curious (sic) why any rational person would want to bury a fascinating subject like curiosity by entangling it with obsolete fantasy-based sophistry like freudianism. Employing but a wee bit of fair-minded imagination instead would surely yield more fruitful and substantial insights.

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.

[–] frevib 3 days ago

This explains it well https://schoolofcuriosity.substack.com/p/why-systems-hate-cu...

[–] interludead 3 days ago

I'm not entirely convinced that the superego is the enemy of curiosity. Some degree of self-restraint probably makes sustained curiosity possible in the first place

[–] oliculipolicula 3 days ago

Give oneself an out (take out precise policies against the risk of indulging any curiosity that worry you)

Labelling such a heuristic "self-restraint" reveals more about the "superego" than about "humanity"

[–] ramshanker 3 days ago

Curiosity must be handled with care Harry. - Prof. Albus Dumbeldore.

One of my favourate quote whenever trying extreme steps.

[–] KingOfCoders 3 days ago

It killed the cat!

[–] oliculipolicula 3 days ago

>but satisfaction brought it back

[–] musicale 3 days ago

Yes! -cats

[–] WalterBright 3 days ago

If curiosity wasn't good for us, we wouldn't have evolved it.

[–] iugtmkbdfil834 4 days ago

Stop daydreaming! Get back to work! Unleashes the leash

[–] curation 3 days ago

We do not want what is good for us.

[–] sfink 3 days ago

Bleh. I made it a ways in, and mostly what I got out of it is that there are more kinds of slop than just AI slop. And psychology is a topic I'm interested in.

[–] PandaRider 3 days ago

> (though Freud makes it clear that when it comes to sexuality, it is never entirely clear what it would be to satisfy our curiosity about sex)

Indeed. For such a predictably basic animal behavior, us humans (who pride our humanity as anything but animals) have an insatiable curiosity for "better" sex...

... (Perhaps more so for men then women)