Why Aren't We Curious About the Things We Want To Be Curious About? (nytimes.com) 90
Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, writes: You can learn anything on the internet, so why do I so often learn things I don't want to know? When I'm surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe's political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about? Curiosity feels like it's outside your control, and trying to direct it sounds as ill conceived as forcing yourself to find a joke funny. But if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better. Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat.
Humans, too, will forgo a known payoff to investigate the unknown. In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should. This preference for novelty is, of course, the reason manufacturers periodically tweak product packaging and advertising. But it's good to know about your environment even if it doesn't promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don't expect any concrete payoff. Infants prefer to look at novel pictures compared with familiar ones. Preschoolers play longer with a mechanical toy if it's difficult to deduce how it works.
Humans, too, will forgo a known payoff to investigate the unknown. In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should. This preference for novelty is, of course, the reason manufacturers periodically tweak product packaging and advertising. But it's good to know about your environment even if it doesn't promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don't expect any concrete payoff. Infants prefer to look at novel pictures compared with familiar ones. Preschoolers play longer with a mechanical toy if it's difficult to deduce how it works.
Because I'm tired (Score:5, Insightful)
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There is more truth to that then the tone of your post leads on.
Quantum Physics, European History, and most big topics that you are not familiar with have a good amount of prerequisites before you can get into the topics.
That is why they are schools and collages, and not just libraries. I went to school and I studied a particular topic. For me to get to the point where I could really focus on what I wanted to study, I had to take a series of prerequisite courses meant to get me prepped to take that class.
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While I don't entirely disagree, There are definitely times that I'm in sit-and-veg mode, because my brain is done for the day.
However, it's a combination of bad habits and laziness if you just do that all of the time. If you're just circling some social media and netflix, yeah, you're just getting fed shit. It's up to you personally to break out of that.
I tend to do some very deep dives on the weekends, as I go through the interesting stuff that's built up in my RSS feed folders. But that interesting stuff
What't the point of all that then? (Score:2)
You are not physically dead, but you sure as hell don't seem to have any actual *life*.
So, why do you think you do it?
Money is not an argument, since we already established you're not using any of it to actually live, and it all gets burned up in the process that was supposed to give you more life.
I hope your job at least furthers your own goals and agenda. Otherwise, you seriously need to get out of there, since any simple remote island fisherman life or the like would be more fulfilling. (And better for y
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not sure it's information overload per se. If that were true then we'd seek to isolate ourselves from information, not seek out random stuff.
I think it's an overload of executive function. In some cases this is due to overload -- we have to spend time paying attention to things we don't want to, and we just get tired of it. But we also live in an environment saturated, not just with information, but information that is presented in a way which is calculated to grab and hold our attention. "Engagement"
Re:Information overload (Score:4, Interesting)
For politics it isn't information overload, but a failure in the internet to qualify the quality of the information.
We are looking for information that makes us feel good. And information we retain or reject alone is an emotional process and not as rational as we may think it is.
If I am an Apple fan. The Apple Macintosh is reasonably priced, because I like my Macintosh and I go the likes of Dell and Lenovo and Spec a system to as closely match what my Macintosh has I am paying hundreds of dollars more for them.
If I am a PC fan. I can find a PC that has the perfect specs for me. Big GPU lots of Ram. Then I go to Apple and try to match my specs Apple hardware is costing hundreds of dollars more for something close. So the Apple product is very expensive.
I can post my findings, and people within my camp will love the information, and often reshare it further and perhaps use it to troll the other camps side. As my information is truthful, it isn't high quality for explaining if PC or Macs are better. Because they are based on different use cases and needs.
Political Redirect is the same thing, they are ounces of truth in it, however they are based on different view points where data may hold more or less data based on your point of view. But because the data provided is skewing the value the of that data it is normally of less quality.
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It's fastfood. We get addicted to the stream of interesting information to the extent that we can't do without anymore. We become uncomfortable when the stream is interrupted and quickly look for input again while in fact our brain should be able to think without external drivers.
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Side-effect of our threat-assessment mechanism? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Age and Marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm closer to 40 than 20 and I spent most of my 20s and early 30s dabbling in hobbies and subjects that interested me. Not so much energy anymore and I'm way busier with other things. Also if you vegetate watching youtube recommendations all evening, no, you're not going to learn about what you want. Read a book instead, away from the computer. Make your first book about marketing and public relations and you'll realize why you can't seem to focus when you're using the internet.
Re: Age and Marketing (Score:2)
Make your first book about marketing and public relations and you'll realize why you can't seem to focus when you're using the internet.
A) Sell the marketing people to China (I'd just rather people not consume our canine symbionts... and pigs are smart).
Go back to Lynx (as in the browser).
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Go back to Lynx (as in the browser).
The helicopter is cool, too, though.
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Make it a book on marketing psychology specifically and you'll get angry about why you can't seem to focus on the Internet.
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Bill Hicks on Marketing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I told you I don't want your Objectivist fantasy (Score:2)
Look, I told you I don't want your Objectivist fantasy, go find someone else to foist it on!
How to be curious... (Score:1)
Make a prediction. Like, predict the number of water molecules in a living cell. Then try to find if you were right. Don't just go find the number... you have to make the prediction first.
Try that with something tied to your politics! (Score:2)
Once upon a time I became curious about the actual effects on the economy of Democrat and Republican policies. I decided to try to come up with a objective way to measure it, BEFORE knowing what the answer would be. I decided I'd graph economic growth vs Democrat and Republican president budget years.
(So offset one year from when they took office, estimating that it takes one year for a president's policies to affect the economy more than his predecessor's politics do.)
Once I had a reasonable obje
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Economic growth ALWAYS improved under Republican budgets and ALWAYS got worse under Democrat budgets, with 2008 being the sole exception.
Clinton's GDP growth was higher in his second term, so I think your ALWAYS might be an exaggeration.
Really it matters what was going on in the senate and especially the house, more than the presidency, and it's hard to set a good delay skew because various things they do have various delayed effects... e.g. tax cuts give a short boost pretty quickly but then the deficit starts to weigh more heavily, long-term social programs funded over a decade that take years to gear up often come to fruition one or two a
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You also have to question whether than "economic growth" is a net positive.
If you have stocks or a retirement fund, you have a stake in the growth and may see a win.
If you are a lowly employee, it's probably you that took most of the cuts to improve the company's bottom line. People become disposable when there's always someone else desperate for a job, so poorer working conditions become more acceptable.
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There is a legitimate argument as to how far back to run such charts since the parties change their policies over the long term and really can't be compared with ancestors, and where you draw the line can be an exercise in cherry-picking.
Once upon a time the Republicans were the pro-immigration, pro-racial equality liberals.
I don't think it's a very useful endeavor.
Have to agree.
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Once upon a time I became curious about the actual effects on the economy of Democrat and Republican policies. I decided to try to come up with a objective way to measure it, BEFORE knowing what the answer would be. I decided I'd graph economic growth vs Democrat and Republican president budget years.9
(So offset one year from when they took office, estimating that it takes one year for a president's policies to affect the economy more than his predecessor's politics do.)
Once I had a reasonable objective measurement, and I knew what my political leanings *wanted* the answer to be, I I got very curious what the actual answer is.
If that makes other people curious, I'll go ahead and tell you the results. Both Republican and Democrat presidents have presided over good times and bad. The average economic growth is about the same for either party. BUT the graph showed something else interesting. Economic growth ALWAYS improved under Republican budgets and ALWAYS got worse under Democrat budgets, with 2008 being the sole exception.
Would you care to share your data? Because that's not what others have found (I'm just posting the first few links I found after searching for economic growth under republicans vs democrats, and they all show higher growth under democrats): https://www.jec.senate.gov/pub... [senate.gov] https://www.salon.com/2015/12/... [salon.com] https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com] https://www.aeaweb.org/researc... [aeaweb.org] https://www.politifact.com/ari... [politifact.com] https://www.factcheck.org/2015... [factcheck.org]
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We all have to be careful about using other people's analysis. You've got some decent sources there, but they're all secondary (or teriary, or quaternary....).
I'd start as close to the numbers as possible. Real GDP (or GNP, or PPP or whatever you like) by year is easy to find, as are .
At Christmas a relative was complaining about the proportion of income that went to taxes. We sat down and looked it up. His number came from a conservative think tank. It was easy to find a number half as big from a liberal t
Those arw measuring a different thing (Score:2)
> Would you care to share your data? Because that's not what others have found
When I get home I'll post the chart that shows it clearly. It's just the official economic growth rate colored blue and red, but that format makes some things more visible.
Your links seem to be measuring a different thing than what I was talking about. More about that in a minute.
Absolutely if you try to, you can find some numbers to make Republicans look good and you can find some numbers to make Democrats look good. The en
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> Would you care to share your data?
Here's the chart:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ray.t... [amazonaws.com]
Again, what I found interesting was whether it got BETTER or WORSE. The actual rate is all over the place. When I ran the numbers in early 2008, the trend was striking. Then we had the crash in 2008, which bucked the trend.
Note one thing - 2008 is rightly assigned to Bush. Sometimes we tend to think of ELECTION years. Obama was _elected_ in 2008, took office in 2009. In 2009 he apppointed his people and got a budge
Re: Try that with something tied to your politics! (Score:2)
Thanks for the data!
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"Here's another one that might make some people curious. How have major changes in gun laws affected crime rates? We could compare crime rates for the 5 years before vs the 5 years after the change in law. The UK and Australia both had significant gun law changes in recent history, and crime rates for both are easily available."
How about correlating abortion rates with crime rates? Seems pretty straightforward to me that the sooner you kill the little buggers the less crime they can commit. Retrospective
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You're correct. The ease of obtaining an abortion in the US (primarily Roe vs. Wade) correlates quite well with crime rates twenty years later (corrected for blah blah).
To restate your premise, unwanted children are more common in low income families, and both being unwanted and born into a low income family are predictors for future criminal activity.
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Both the legailization of abortion in the United States and the removal of gasoline occurred at about the same time, so it was easy to falsely attribute the cause.
You seem to be making a serious false assumption that there can be only one factor. In fact, the evidence is strong for both, but even together they do not fully explain the changes. Many factors affect crime rates.
And comparing countries is less helpful than comparing states within the US, where abortion was made available at different times. Crime in the US is very different to in Europe, especially back then. If you must compare countries, you should control for race (e.g. data for whites in the US when
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good example though I'd have to check that research b/c how could it be mostly even but systematically always get worse in one case and better in the other.
Independent. maybe economy influences elections? (Score:2)
> how could it be mostly even but systematically always get worse in one case and better in the other.
The absolute rate is a totally different figure from whether it's increasing or decreasing. If economic growth was at 8% at the beginning of a term, and 6% at the end, it got worse. The *change* is -2%.
If it was at 2% and the president's policies got it to 3%, that's an improvement. Times with high rates can be times where they are getting worse, times with low rates can be when they are getting bette
except that's not how it works (Score:1)
The Dems get elected in downturns, and generally improve the situation. I.e. Clinton started with a Reagan bubble, and is the only president in my lifetime to eliminate the deficit. Obama inherited a huge crisis, a huge deficit, and made it smaller, Trump has ballooned it.
Tax cuts sound good when you have a job and pay taxes. What you're doing is the opposite of checking your predictions against facts.
You forgot a president (Score:2)
> The Dems get elected in downturns, and generally improve the situation. I.e. Clinton started with a Reagan bubble
I think you forgot a president. Anyway, I can see you're a fan of Clinton and Democrats. That"s cool. Believe what you want. If you enjoy being a fan, you probably don't want to look at the actual economic growth chart:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ray.t... [amazonaws.com]
I'm not a fan of the clintons (Score:1)
Reagan was the architect of that bubble. I'm not a fan of the Clintons, or even political parties. Maybe you think I'm a fan of Bill Clinton because I honestly relayed the facts about him and the deficit? Here's the deficit chart. It's easy to grow the economy if you just go into debt.
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thu... [forbes.com]
btw wtf is that chart? (Score:1)
"economic growth"... jobs... stock market... what? what are the units... oh look it went up to 6.
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Economic growth, one of the two principal measurements of the health of the economy, is literally the growth of the economy, increase of GDP.
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
If you'd like to start get a basic understanding of macroeconomics, it's all about the interaction between economic growth, unemployment, and inflation. To simplify it down two two numbers, economic growth is normally stated in "real terms" - growth minus inflation.
there are a lot of growth indicators. (Score:1)
When I was young they used GNP.
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The UK and Australia both had significant gun law changes in recent history, and crime rates for both are easily available.
Sorry, but we cannot help you there. The sort of sensible gun controls that people seek in the US were already largely in place in Australia.
The gun homicide rate in Australia is only 4% that of the US. (0.18 vs 4.46) so comparisons are pointless.
The changes in 1996 were in response to a mass-shooting, and restricted semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns. Mass-shootings happen in clusters to to sensational media treatment. They are rare enough that the lack of shootings since is no proof of an
such bold assertions (Score:1)
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Evolution is nonsense, there is no way something as complex as a human evolved in only six days!
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Mathematically prove it or I'll tell bad Trump jokes!
It's real simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it takes time and effort to stay focused. It is easy to become distracted because we buy into the lie that "Oh look! Shiny! It is new therefore it is interesting." Modern life is CONSTANTLY being interrupted with everything vying for our attention. The visual diarrhea of ads also don't help.
As Steve Jobs once said: Focus is about saying no. [youtube.com] It requires discipline to stay focused.
You can see this in music when you are told to play a piece slowly. People tend to want to rush the tempo. It takes work to work on the "boring fundamentals."
In sports you don't usually win via "trick shots". You win by having consistent and good skill of the fundamentals.
There is a famous cliche allegedly by Bruce Lee:
i.e. Perfect Practice makes Perfect
If you want to learn interesting things then try these steps:
1. Learn to prioritize
2. If you fail to plan you plan to fail
3. Set aside dedicated time
4. Focus
5. Ignore the distractions
6. Having a schedule ironically provides freedom
7. It may be easier to do it first thing in the morning. That way everyday you wake up with a fresh attitude of "What cool new stuff do I want to learn today!"
Try it for an hour every week. You'll be amazed at what you learn.
I don't see any "Silver Bullet" for Focus and Discipline other then the right strategy, tactics, and execution.
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Mod parent up.
I think also there's a web of knowledge that you have, and stuff that connects to some of that is more interesting than less related facts. For example, I found Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" fascinating. It's from a historical period I have read about quite a lot already (not least from Gore Vidal's "Lincoln"). On the other hand, Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The Romanovs" hasn't gripped me as much, even though it's full of fascinating material about the tsars (and a retinue of dwarves,
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There's an interesting effect where you learn best when a little bit stressed. The ideal teaching environment is one in which the material is a bit more difficult than you're comfortable with, but not so much that you feel hopeless.
The trick is to recognize when you're in that groove and learn to interpret the mild stress as excitement in anticipation of "getting it".
Corollary: anybody who insists learning should always be fun doesn't know much about learning.
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Corollary: anybody who insists learning should always be fun doesn't know much about learning.
I'm not going to disagree with this on its face, but excitement and fun are both forms of stress. It's really a frame of mind thing whether you find that stress enjoyable or not.
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That's why I put in the world "always". Learning, at least efficient learning, should be a roller coaster ride. Like a good drama, with highs and lows, building tension and release. Like playing the slots.
Because you don't look that up? (Score:2)
I keep a list of things I'm interested in and look that up. If I hear a word I don't know I look that up. Maybe you don't really care about the answer and you just like asking questions, and for no reason apparently.
Are you asking yourself the same questions over and over? Are you actually interested in anything? When other people talk do you listen?
Maybe you're not curious and you just love mental masturbation.
Who's 'we'? (Score:3)
"We" are curious about the things we want to be curious about. I do not click on top ten lists. I do not click on YouTube videos with titles that end in question marks. I have better things to do with my time than reward some asshat's motherfucking clickbait. Don't take the bait and you'll be surprised how much time you have to investigate things you actually care about.
And the people who do click on clickbait? "They" are not "we". They are the chattering classes, the bottom of the bell curve, the people who may be curious, but can definitely be lead by the nose with alarming ease. We know they exist and we can safely assume they're the majority, or clickbait wouldn't be so damn pervasive.
I'm not saying I'm perfect. I did click on a top ten list. Twice. And that's 4 minutes of my life I'll never get back. It should have 20 seconds, but there was one item per page.... of course. I learned. Judging by the state of the Internet, most people never do.
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Exactly. Maybe the author is just an idiot. I guess that never occurred to him.
Many don't have it at all (Score:2)
I have never understood why some people seem to have no drive to learn at all. I find myself looking at an item and take it apart or research it. To many people, even simple things in life work by fucking magic. It irritates me when I don't understand the concept of what makes something work and I work to change that situation because I find it fun and rewarding.
Well, it *is* fun and rewarding. (Score:2)
Fun is literally the feeling for being surprised by events that are joyous due to giving you rewards. (Only most of the brain can't tell imaginary input from real input.)
And the whole purpose of the brain, is to find patterns in your input, that allow you to predict future events based on past events. In order to enable you, to know what to alter in the surrounding world, to get closer to whatever is your goal. And it uses the above feelings, among others, to drive you towards improving that and doing more
Because dopamine (Score:2)
Your reward circuit is easily drawn to quick fixes, much in the way that people snort cocaine, they will generally choose short-term gratification as opposed to the arguably less dopaminergic engrossment in the understanding of complex topics.
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Quite likely. There's a tradeoff between exploration (trying new things) and exploitation (doing something that works over and over). Evolutionarily, healthy populations need a mixture of both; exploitation produces resources, but exploration potentially uncovers even better ways to do things and also provides the ability for the population to adapt to changing conditions. There are genes that are associated with exploration and exploitation.
You may have noticed things like "black sheep" in families, or an
I *am* curious about them. (Score:2)
They are just way too hard to find, im that pile of trash the media produces every day.
And the media is too spineless, to actually *lead*, other than with (externally-controlled) propaganda. So it just produces more of what we read more. Ignoring that we only read it more because of the above! Resulting in a death spiral towards the dumbest common denominator.
You can see the same problem with electronics and software, trying to become "simpler". Despite being way past the optimal point, down into the land o
It's about focus and intent (Score:2)
''Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?''
If my intent is to find something specific and the reason for my query is do accomplish a task, useless tangents are a waste of time proportional to how necessary it is to complete the task.
If the reason for my query isn't to accomplish a specific task, or if I satisfy my query with content already presented, sure... I might want to see the three headed creature that has only one arm and end up on some subreddit filling le
The professor should speak for himself (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I have with this is the myopia. The professor observed some behaviors in himself, and then spun a wild web of conjecture assuming that everyone was like him.
Different people are different. When I have some idle time, I am often drawn to articles about European history and the nature of stars. Just last week I spent an hour reading contemporary essays from the English press on the French Revolution. It was a fascinating perspective and really pushed against my preconception that the French Revolution was a bottom-up affair.
It the past several months, off the top of my head, I've read about the historical development of particle accelerators, the detailed design considerations of the CDC6600 supercomputer (one of Seymour Cray's first), and accounts of the first scientific investigations of the Pyramids, starting with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.
The point here is different people are drawn to different things. That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with reading about the menu at Alcatraz or even unwinding looking at memes or funny tweets. It's entertainment. I think the professor here contributes exactly nothing to the understanding of people.
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Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, writes...When I'm surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe's political history or the nature of quasars...
The professor isn't really interested in political history or quasars. He's interested in *appearing" to be interested in such high-brow academic subjects so he can go to cocktail parties and bloviate about them.
Psychology the dumbest science (Score:2)
In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should.
Because if you don't know the payout of a given choice, you should investigate it and see if it is any good. This ins't psychology, its math and game theory.
Wrong rabbit hole to go down, perhaps? (Score:2)
Seems to me, the author is asking this question because he hopes to figure out a method to more "efficiently" direct human curiosity. In reality, if this was truly possible to do? I think a whole lot of people would wind up with a less varied base of knowledge.
We often find ourselves reading about a topic we don't think is objectively "good information" compared to another topic we might feel guilty we didn't take the time to learn more about instead. But practical reasons exist for that, like ease of dige
Take this guy seriously (Score:2)
Daniel Willingham's one of those rare & special people: He's a leading expert in his field but humble & approachable, he's generous & supportive to everyone he comes into contact with (check out his Twitter feed @DTWillingham), & he's an impressively good science communicator (check out any of his popular cognitive science books on learning & education).
If you're at all interested in understanding learning & education better, Willingham's a great source of useful insights. He writes
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But he is a twatter. Nuff said.
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Quite a broad statement.. (Score:2)
''You can learn anything on the internet''
The real issue is that the majority of users have no idea how to assess the quality of the information they are trying to ''learn'' from.
It's not curiousity... (Score:1)
... often times we think we want to "know" something when we really already know that what we are intereted is a massive undertaking, aka "curiousity" becomes education when you need to spend years of time focused on a single task or topic. It's like asking "why aren't we gods?"... well because there are biological costs associated with learning, aka work, pain, suffering, and if you aren't willing to deal with that level of stress and work we'll remain ignorant as a fact of simple physics.
We can only lear
Because (Score:2)
Because you are a psychologist, and thus mentally retarded, insane, or both.
You're aren't curios about the things you want to be curious about because you don't actually want to be curious about them.
You just don't want to admit to yourself that you're not interested enough in whatever grand, meaningful thing (that you want to feed your ego with) to keep your mind on it.
The question is ... (Score:2)
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You were curiously curious about being not-curious.
Jargon (Score:2)
The more interesting topics have specialists that develop jargon.
Jargon is very good at communicating fine detail to people that know enough to need and want the fine detail. But it confuses beginners that don't know the fine details.
A simple example is the word 'enterprise'. IT people love to use the word 'enterprise' because it includes business, government, and non-profits. But it just confuses people that are not that technical. If you are not talking to a CEO and need to make sure he understand you
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Whoops, forgot to add that the interesting topics often end up using jargon when they don't have to. So when you start reading it, you get bored by the extra work needed to understand the jargon. Then you stop reading the 'interesting' topic and go somewhere without all the jargon.
Curiosity killed the cat (Score:1)
Not necessarily. You may fall into a mud-pit you didn't know about or be chased by predators who win because they know the terrain better than you.
Lojik (Score:2)
Give them CSS.
Maybe the question should be... (Score:2)
... why when you go out looking for something on the Internet your attention span is so short?
Curious? (Score:2)
What the OP means to ask... (Score:2)
I think what the OP means to ask is: Why Aren't I Curious About the Things I Think I Should Be Curious About?
Because it takes work to remain focused (Score:2)
You have to deliberately ignore things that are not on your to-do list. Those things on your to-do list need to be integrated into your online daily habits, not an afterthought. You need to set up your topic-specific podcasts for on the road, RSS readers, mail filters to sort the important stuff, Google Scholar Alerts to tell you what is real scientific news that you care about. Anything you touch needs to direct you directly to the things that matter most. That all requires that you think about what is im
You are? (Score:1)
What am I reading Slashdot instead of Voltaire? (Score:1)
Dunno. Just... dunno.
I just don't give a fk anymore about being curios (Score:2)
Repetitive grey matter synapses (Score:1)
The library environment lended to learning, but having "the world at your finger-tips" almost anywhere with the Internet perhaps dulls the "thrill of the hunt" with learning or blows the dopamine fuse after proloned use.
Now that we have training-wheels with LTM and STM, is there a line in the sand with life-long jeopardy baggage vs nuggets of experience or knowledge as far as
Dear Daniel T. Willingham (Score:2)
Please do not project your particular weaknesses onto the rest of us. Thank you.
the curious story of a quantified-self (Score:2)
I have a long-term sleep disorder which often reduces me to a state not of much use for gainful employment, but leaves my learning system alone (however, my insights into what I've learned in my cognitively impaired state must wait until my sleep improves—and then all of these insights surface pretty much simultaneously, leading me to suspect that areas of my brain are still functioning down there, but they go offline in contributing their conclusions to my conscious cognition until restful sleep mend