Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know

nautil.us

125 pointspmcpinto12 comments

Parallel ideas:

  -The thing you know the most define the things you laugh about
  -Arguments can be won on an abuse of dragging the topic to an area of your knowledge

And last but not least:

  "I know that I know nothing"[0]

Therefore you have curiosity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

Curiosity does increase the likelihood of survival by expanding the information an organism has or simply have it wander into a more effective or new way of living.

Curiosity can also decrease likelihood of survival. See: saying about curiosity and cats. But as a species you might be correct.

I believe he is absolutely correct when it comes to curiosity increasing the likelihood of survival of a species (ignoring the species problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem). Because others learn from the curiosity of others as well as the one that is curious. Even if the occasional damage is dealt to a species through curiosity, the other members will likely learn and benefit from the mistakes previous beings have made.

Curiosity is good for the group, but perhaps not for the individual?

In evolutionary terms, this is all that matters. For individuals it's definitely a crapshoot.

In which case you can make a Darwinian distinction between a "clumsy" curiosity and a "cautious" one, with the cautious types eventually winning out.

Hard to draw a line, because "curiosity kills the cat" is to say about a witty animal. Cat is surely wicked. But it gets killed.

But that needs some science of curiosity.

I wonder how related this is to the mechanics behind confirmation bias. We all have a tendency to seek out get evidence that matches our "predictions" so to say. Maybe what we define as curiosity is actually just searching for the little hit of dopamine you get when you're right.

People who are right-brained tend to be creative, curious and intuitive, while those ruled by the left are logical, strategic and rational

You can't seriously be saying logical people aren't very curious? :(

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