Curiosity Is Better Than Being Smart?
durmonski.com
durmonski.com
This article reads like un-researched folk psychology rather than science, which is fine I guess, but I would take it all with skepticism.
I'll note that based on my and others' research, it seems to be better to have state curiosity (curiosity about the task at hand) rather than trait curiosity (as in, claiming to be a person with a high curiosity personality trait). Trait curiosity gets you almost nothing: no better learning outcomes, no better performance, and no better recall (in complex problem solving anyway; results are sometimes different in trivial pursuits, but who cares about that [edit: I shouldn't say it that way. I was being glib. From a scientific knowledge standpoint, of course we are curious about how curiosity works in trivial matters!]).
I don't believe there is a way to boost your state (task) curiosity. I'd also be skeptical that you can boost your trait curiosity.
Anyway, one of the main problems with curiosity research is the difficulty in even defining curiosity to a high degree of consensus. I would suggest that as you read this thread, you will see various meanings.
Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge? Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong? Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses? Is it a motivation sparked by novelty or uncertainty?
I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is. :)
What I do know is that I have what you call trait curiosity. For me it feels like a drive, but it can be quite chaotic and distracting, so I have to kind of funnel it, give myself deliberate time to follow it (play) and time where I push it aside.
The latter takes a ton of energy and discipline sometimes. It’s work.
Edit: I‘m pretty sure I get a ton of value out of my curiosity though. Task at hand curiosity I guess? Not sure If I understand what you’re saying.
So question, what sort of overlap do you see between trait curiosity and state curiosity, and if trait curiosity doesn't get you those things, is the implication that state curiosity does?
Where does retrospection lie with regard to curiosity?
I read the explanation on Wikipedia[1] and am honestly less clear, as their example gives me the impression of trait curiosity. I like to dig into what I'm doing to really understand what makes it tick, I hate memorizing things and desire to know why things are the way they are, not just that they are, is that an example of state curiosity?
To answer your question, I would say curiosity is all those things. If I understand these two types correctly and I was trying to define them as narrowly as possible, I'd say that state curiosity is a desire to understand patterns and their significance, whereas trait curiosity is the desire for more novel information and experiences.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity#State_and_trait_curi...
In fact, in many of our experiments, trait curiosity is a moderately good inverse predictor of state curiosity (negative correlation). In other words, if you rate yourself as a generally highly curious person, then we can slightly predict that you will not be curious about the task at hand. This slight anticorrelation is unusual! I think that some people like to see themselves as generally curious, but maybe not many people really are? Dunno for sure, though.
> if trait curiosity doesn't get you those things, is the implication that state curiosity does?
Yes. State curiosity, or rating high curiosity about the task at hand, gets better results in complex problem solving. There might be some sort of affinity effect. If you like complex problems, then you're more curious about complex problems, and therefore tend to do better at them. Maybe? Makes some sense.
Causation is difficult to show. Are you curious because you are good at it and want to know if you're right? Are you good at it because your curiosity has led you practice and learn how to solve these problems? Still, the effect is consistently there.
> Where does retrospection lie with regard to curiosity?
Probably depends on what you mean. Curiosity can be both relatively fleeting and quite long lasting given differing circumstances, so I'm not sure I can say much without clarification.
> is that an example of state curiosity?
First, I'd say that wiki stub about state/trait is lacking. I can see why you'd be confused. I do not recall reading a great "here's what state/trait are", just more like reading 1000s of papers. The research on the personality trait of curiosity and the state of being task-oriented curious perhaps surprisingly do not overlap very much. Your example could be an example of either trait or state. If generally you like to know how things work, then that might indeed be an example of trait curiosity. When you want to know how this $widget right in front of you works, and you spend time taking it apart and reassembling it until you are satisfied, then that might be an example of state curiosity. And so you can be one without the other. You can want to know how things work, without really bothering to investigate. Or you can not want to know how everything works, but really want to know how this one $widget works. Or both. There's nothing that says you cannot be both. The anticorrelation is 1) weak, and 2) not necessarily causal.
As opposed to task curiosity which seems to be real curiosity in the sense that you actually need to act on it to be considered curious.
Could choosing to work in a field that one considers more interesting lead to more state curiosity when doing that work?
I shouldn't say that trait curiosity doesn't get you anything. It may correlate with some benefits, though it is not clear to me that trait curiosity research has sufficiently proven that trait curiosity gets you more than higher intelligence does. From my reading, pretty much all of the benefits claimed by trait curiosity are just the benefits of being smarter, so I'm not really convinced there is anything there.
With that said: yes, I would say that in my research and my general sense, there is a noticeable effect size between state curiosity and performance. This includes being objectively correct in problem solving, ability to recall over time (better memory), better memory accuracy, etc.
> Could choosing to work in a field that one considers more interesting lead to more state curiosity when doing that work?
I think this is probably true. Certainly there are proposed links between interest and curiosity in the literature. Some, I would say, argue there is no difference, though I think there probably still is some difference. I am interested in certain type of art, for example, while at the same time not being curious about how it's made or anything else about it apart from wanting to look at it.
Believing what I believe, if I wanted to perform better and be more stimulated by my work, I would certainly focus on interest and curiosity. But I am biased, because I work on curiosity itself. I am literally curious about the thing that makes me curious about itself. :)
If your goal is fame or money or power, then following your interests and curiosity might not get you there, of course.
From my perspective in psychology and anthropology, evolution provides a better definition. The desire for a mental model is created mostly by the nature/nurture split in gene-culture coevolution, in which information is expensive when stored in DNA and cheap when stored in culture, hence creating a generic need for information intake, and thus a generic emotion to drive that need. "Curiosity" can then be defined as that emotion.
The circumstances which prompt that desire are determined by what "fun" is. Defining "fun" has a short and universal answer with a severe discursion into a long heuristics-and-biases approach. Judging fun requires the mind to make evaluations which are inherently difficult for System 1 to approximate, so behavior in practice very poorly approximates the short-form answer, especially as videogames explore its boundaries past what evolution is able to capably fit.
Both "curiosity" and "fun" have the problem that they are only linguistic concepts which converge as approximations to what people feel. These feelings have an unambiguous origin through evolution, which is the best way to create a description free of "common knowledge" (which relies on shared understanding to cover up vagueness). Even though the underlying definition is clear and consistent, people's usage is not so clear or consistent, and some tolerance for linguistic fuzziness is needed.
There are a few adjacent emotions which don't cleave in canonical ways, so the definition is also not canonical. I picked the emotion for mental modeling because that seems to be the origin of humans' approximate definition, and hence will best align with what people refer to in normal conversation. But you could also pick the exact concept that this emotion tries to approximate, and that would be an equally valid definition, just different. Or you could talk about information instead of modeling, but I won't.
Defining things through evolution may not be useful for laymen, because it's hard to tie evolution to behavior. But at least the definition can guide understanding even if the details are impossible to figure out. And this way, I get to sidestep your 4 questions by embedding them in the heuristics and biases that inevitably stem from an evolutionary approach.
Personally I think wise > smart.
Maybe the difference is that being smart means that you know how to apply knowledge and being wise means when to apply knowledge.
And maybe wisdom is about a desire to learn and being smart about a desire to know.
I suspect that some people really like to think of themselves as curious such that feeling that way is a part of their identity. They consider themselves to be generally curious about everything. However, there are almost an infinite number of things you could be curious about. It seems unlikely that even a high trait curiosity person is really curious about everything.
If I construct several curiosity experiments with tasks asking about 1) math and logic problems, 2) fashion in late 15th Century Venice, 3) the mating habits of honeybees, and 4) political conflicts in the Han Dynasty, how many self-reported high curiosity people do you expect would rate all of those tasks with high degrees of curiosity? I suspect not all or even many.
Still, I don't think this means that high trait curiosity doesn't exist [edit: s/exists/doesn't exist/]. I just think it's not a good predictor of curiosity in the task or specific performance, among other things.
It would be odd to describe it as an emotional motivation and not a behaviour.
I'd say the behaviour is a pursuit of not immediately necessary information. The subject is drawn to unravel unknowns in their environment. It might be broadly focussed to flip every stone or narrow to a subject e.g. people or a topic.
The various motivations for this behaviour probably encompasses all human motivations. It might be delight/entertainment/play of discovery, collector/completionist type obsession, fear/anxiety/pessimism/paranoia of unknowns, ego preservation to be the "one who knows", procrastination in the face of aversive tasks...
On the contrary, I can certainly imagine (from experience :-) ) being curious about something but too lazy to actually find out. Just like someone can be hungry but too lazy to go out and get food, but they're still hungry (I'm not sure whether such a person could be described as "greedy" though). I think that all confirms the parent comment's point that some forms of curiosity don't lead to better outcomes.
Anyway, it's all a word game which is why I would expect a researcher to focus on observable phenomena and not define it in terms of qualia.
Agreed that this is all word games. Hopefully any good research would start by defining their terminology.
When a child complains of being hungry and pointing at the donuts, we offer them an apple and they storm off in a huff, we say "ha, you weren't really hungry". We reject the claim of hunger and instead suspect a desire for sugary stimulation.
Hunger is not a pure mental state but a case where physical sensations are labelled as hunger and we should often doubt that labelling. If you are on a diet there are common maxims like "are you hungry or just bored?" with advice to seek distraction because a momentary physical sensation will fade. We confuse many physical sensations for what we might want to strictly define as hunger especially when eating makes those sensations cease e.g. dyspepsia, low-mood, boredom etc. Initial assumptions of hunger can be relabelled just like the "I am excited not anxious" trick before public speaking.
The physical sensations driving the type of hunger from habitual anticipation of food are caused by observable changes in the body as it prepares itself (hormonal changes / stomach acid etc.). That gives some empirical baseline beyond qualia. So for this person on the sofa, too lazy to go eat, we should be suspicious of their labelling but can look at what their body is doing.
It's also notable that if you do any long term fasting (weeks) you find people talk about hitting "real hunger" and it's startling different experience from everyday hunger. I expect there are related physical changes but it's quite a different mental sensation - it's almost like fear - the feeling of an alarm cord being pulled and an "oh shit, I have to eat now".
> 1. that my children’s happiness is far more important than their academic or financial success;
> 2. that women and men are equally moral and equally intelligent;
> 3. that most people are basically good at heart.
> I care that I believe these things. I want to be the kind of person who believes such things. I feel as though if I didn’t believe these things, it would be rather sad.
> I also feel like I am saying something true when I assert these propositions. When I pause to reflect on the matter, I feel sincere inner assent. I feel confident that these claims are correct. I explicitly and consciously judge them to be so. In other words, I intellectually endorse these propositions.
> On one view of belief, intellectual endorsement is sufficient for belief—or nearly sufficient, or sufficient in normal circumstances. If upon reflection I say “Most people are basically good at heart” with a feeling of confidence and sincerity, then that’s what I believe. My beliefs are, so to speak, written on the face of my intellectual endorsements. Let’s call this view intellectualism about belief.
> On another view, intellectual endorsement isn’t enough for belief. To determine whether I genuinely believe the propositions I sincerely affirm, we must inquire further. We must look at my overall pattern of actions and reactions, or at how I live my life generally. Do I in fact tend to treat my children’s happiness as far more important than their academic success? For instance, am I generally more heartened by signs of their emotional health than by their good grades?
> Similarly, in my day-to-day interactions with women and men, do I tend to treat them as intellectually and morally equal? For instance, am I as ready to attribute academic brilliance to a woman as to a man? If I do not generally act and react in a way that reflects the wise, egalitarian, uncynical vision that I proudly endorse in affirming propositions 1–3, then, on this second type of view, it’s not quite right to say that I really or fully have those beliefs. I might simply fail to have those beliefs. Alternatively, it might be best to describe me as being in a muddy, inconsistent, indeterminate, or in-betweenish state. Let’s call a view of belief pragmatist if it treats belief as behaviorally demanding in this way.
> In this essay, I will argue for a pragmatic approach to belief and against an intellectualist approach. I will argue that the pragmatic approach is preferable because it better expresses our values, keeps our disciplinary focus on what is important, and encourages salutary self-examination. It directs our attention to what we ought to care about most in thinking about belief: our overall ways of acting in and reacting to the world.
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from The Pragmatic Metaphysics of Belief
Or rather, it's the failure to endorse Theory-Theory as an axiom. Plenty of people who don't do that think of this type of introspection as a self-narrative rather than an actual inspection of anything. An Epiphenomenalist might say that beliefs about one's own "emotions" are a retrospective interpretation of instinctive activations of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
And they'd have experimental evidence on their side. To believe in emotions without coherent physical expressions or locations can seem like a form of dualism.
Presumably some perceived traits have positive effects - driving one's own behaviour with "I'm not a quitter" or whatever. But I find it fascinating that traits might not always be strongly correlated with what people actually do.
Trait curiosity is generally thought of as people who exhibit a broad desire to learn, to be open to new experiences, and to be creative, for example. If you like reading books on a wide variety of topics, or studying a range of fields in school or personal life, then you might have a curious personality trait. In this case, it is generally thought that you will rate certain questions on the Big Five Index [BFI] or the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory ver. 2 [CEI-II] more highly than others. I do not research trait curiosity. I collect data on it, but it's not that useful to me, really.
Instead, I do computational modelling of human behavior using performance on discrete tasks and ratings about those tasks, which is more like state curiosity. If you are solving puzzles, or answering math/logic problems, or recalling difficult memory tasks, or answering pub trivia questions, and rating your curiosity levels about the discrete tasks or even individual questions, then that is generally considered state curiosity.
Trait curiosity is part of your personality, while state curiosity is episodic (though with indeterminate time periods). Does that help?
curiosity: when you perceive a gap in your knowledge that has no immediate need to be resolved how much effort do you put in to filling the gap. how burning is your desire to verify all possible logical links that may exist with the only reward being that verfication.
trait vs task curiosity sounds more like the impact of other dimensions, e.g. prioritisation focus and self perception regarding productivity.
My guess is that the more productive nature of task curiosity is just the person being tested having well practiced "i dont need to worry about that" routines.
It would also be very hard to gauge the impact of wider experience.. i can be a horrendous time waster with curiosity, however i also have a wide range of random knowledge that keeps me on track in un-expected ways. e.g. remembering that i let something slide previously and it worked out ok. I actually would not be surprised to find an overlap between those perceived to have task specific curiosity and those perceived to trust the wider systems they operate within (with those perceivesd to have general curiosity less trusting of wider systems)
Once you’ve figured that out, you move on to other things, but the idea is the same.
Maybe this could be reduced to something like "desire for novelty". But then I think that's too broad. For example, wanting the latest iPhone is a type of "desire for novelty". Would you consider someone a curious person just because they buy the latest Apple products?
Then maybe you could, instead, only consider "intellectual curiosity", where intellectual curiosity is the desire for new knowledge - descriptive knowledge, prodcedural knowledge, experiential knowledge, etc. Then I guess getting the latest iPhone is also a type of experiential knowledge, so this fails, too...
Is curiosity a desire to gain knowledge?
Is it a desire to see if you are right or wrong?
Is it a drive to test existing hypotheses?
I think the defining trait of curious people is that they understand that they are ignorant. Socrates is a great example of a curious person, he even taught by asking questions rather than providing answers, and a large part of what he seems to have wanted to teach is his method of asking questions. I certainly found myself employing that method of engaging with the world after reading Plato, and it just eroded away a lot of assumptions I had never thought to challenge. Which just raised more questions.
It's humbling discovering that things you thought you knew as truth were just notions that sound true. Like why do we value freedom in society? Beyond "it seems true to lots of people" I genuinely don't know, and it's kind of terrifying that I can't seem to find a good answer for that. Now some of you are already typing an answer to why we value freedom, do yourself a favor and repeat the question "Ok, why is that?" a couple of times and don't take "it's obvious!" for an answer and you will see what I mean.
It creates a desire to engage with the world as it is, rather than our notions of what it is. Overall curiosity is something I associate with people who are skeptics, like Michel de Montaigne or David Hume.
It requires a rare sense of detachment to go "huh, I wonder why he thinks like that when things appear quite different through my eyes?" when you hear someone say something you disagree with.
If you play a game and you lose, you can either get involved in the loss and be upset that your strategy didn't work even though it should have, or you can go "huh, I thought that would work, I wonder why not?"
I think curiosity hinges on not identifying yourself so much with your preconceived notions of the world. If we pride ourselves on how much we know, then facts that disagree with what we know threaten to unravel our self-esteem, so we push them away and refuse to consider such possibilities.
If I want to know why rust happens, I'm curious about that effect and its mechanism.
If I think I know why rust happens, and I prove or disprove it, my goal wasn't to learn why it happens, but to prove myself right or wrong. If I'm disproven, I might not even choose to find out the real answer, but just stop.
The third thing is most closely related with the second, IMO, and I do have a hard time separating them, though there is more of a scientific bent to the last one.
Using that metaphor, curiosity to me is the desire to expand small bubbles on the perimeter of the bubble of my knowledge. It may manifest in all the ways you mentioned. Why is this I’m doing not working? Or simply wondering “why can’t lions purr?” and expanding my bubble that tiny amount for no practical reason but to do so.
I think trait curiosity works similarly with other traits that people can fall into the trap of ascribing to themselves. For example, telling others that you are hard working, never giving up, always being there for people or whatever. Once you start repeating to yourself and to others such statements you can in a sense 'lock yourself' into it. You get into situation where you start thinking 'well, a curious person in this situation should do this, I better do it or else I'm not curious'. I think this is the difference in outcome in trivial pursuits as you say.
On the other hand it's very difficult to be curious about something you really know nothing or very little about. It really makes little sense to be curious about cryptography or quantum computing if you struggled with high school algebra and never made any serious effort to improve your skills and understanding.
Of course none of this is to claim that there is no such thing as pursuing knowledge or ideas without seemingly any external motivation. The way it looks from the inside I think is usually you have to have some idea of what you're doing and you want to see if you can apply this to something else. Counterintuitively, here you're trying to see if something that should be considered different is in fact some slight modification of what you already know. So it's usually not "let's learn something completely new because I like to learn things and am curious" but "let's see if I can reformulate this thing that looks unknown to something that I know". This is the creative part where you are actually learning. The process of reformulating or restating something with a language that you understand and you've built for yourself, bringing in the new idea, often not explicitly stated to be connected with what you know, is what gives you the kick.
Then there's the desires behind this action which can be hugely different and vary one day to the next. I think people who focus their curiosity on a single area tend to succeed outwardly for it. But people who have broad curiosity ('trait curiosity' as you put it) have enriched and possibly happier lives for this.
Vladimir Nabokov
For me it's mostly defining the undefined. I don't do it for the sake of gaining knowledge, it's more like "oh, so that's how it works". I like the feeling of taking something that feels like a magical black box and systematically breaking it down to the point where it doesn't feel magical anymore. Often times you only need a little bit more than a surface level understanding to get to this point.
This is also a good working definition of “engineering”.
This metaphor allows for creativity, cleverness, novelty, esthetics.
Most of my software development, production of code, does not meet this standard, so is not "software engineering".
I liken curiosity to foraging. The problem space isn't well known, or poorly defined. Or just new to me. Let's go play, see what we find.
--
As for your OC, your form of curiosity is yet another form of smart.
Some people are book smart. Some with better working memory are better at mental gymnastics. Some, like with your book summaries, are smart at generalization, distilling concepts to their essence.
I like to think my form of smart is fondness for metaphors. My contributions to humanity have come from noticing when apparently dissimilar problems can be reframed, using the parallel, applying notions from one problem to another. It's a bit like reframing an optimization challenge to look like Traveling Sales Person, applying all that prior work to a new problem set.
For me it's not just the desire to solve a problem, it's the desire to know whether I've solved it in the best possible way. This requires you to explore the problem space laterally.
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.75
I am really sorry. I do not know if there is an open access version of this paper.
If you start from there and then find work that cites that, you will be able to find most modern curiosity research, I would wager. Not everyone agrees with what followed from this, but pretty much everyone has to contend with it in one way or another. I would claim that there is not really a consensus, but "knowledge gap" (or "information gap") and "uncertainty" are probably the most prominent and influential keywords.
***
Okay, I did a bit more digging in my file system and found a reasonably recent overview by two fairly prominent researchers that might serve as a decent starting point. While I don't agree with everything here, that hardly matters of course. It's a place to start.
I think it is open access. It is for me in firefox with no javascript enabled, anyway.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4635443/
and seems to be available directly from one of the authors, if nothing else:
May it be, that positive outcomes of curiosity as a trait are beyond what you are measuring? For example, I learned a lot about how organizations work, because I was curious often why some organization failed to do something, or how it managed to do something where other failed. I had no idea at first what it means to go to Moon from organizational point of view, but when some managed to do it while other failed, I became curious. This curiosity led me to learn a lot about management on many examples, and often I found something to think about when I least expected it. Like I read some random news article and it mentioned some difficulties which organization faced. And my curiosity at first was not directed at management, though with time the direction shifted, now I curious how organizations work even when it have nothing to do with Moon.
When you have a lot of unanswered questions in your head, then almost everything counts for something to one of these questions.
> I don't believe there is a way to boost your state (task) curiosity. I'd also be skeptical that you can boost your trait curiosity.
Operant conditioning? Eat a cookie every time you've found a curios question, googled it and found an answer. Wouldn't it work? I believe it would boost the trait. I'm not sure about the state curiosity.
> I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you, dear reader, think curiosity really is.
I think, that we need first to separate curiosity as a behavior and curiosity as a trait of mind. As a behavior curiosity is anything from your list: desire to gain knowledge, or to see if you are right or wrong, or testing existing hypotheses, and so on.
Curiosity as a mind trait is an urge to pull a dangling thread. When you see a question without a clear answer, you feel desire to answer it. Some people do not see questions, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are not curious, their curiosity is just triggered less often. Some people see questions, but do not behave as curious, either because they are not curious enough (they lack curiosity), or they invent some answer that doesn't really answer anything (like "why this happened"? "because of magic"). These magic answers, I believe, is the result of untrained curiosity. People feel urge to answer question, but they cannot find a way to use their urge for constructive purposes, so they do something to stop their urge bothering them.
Curiosity is different from smarts. I would be skeptical about any essay trying to say {apples} are better than {oranges}.
If I had to pick one (and maybe you primed my response), I'd say curiosity is motivation sparked by uncertainty. I think curiosity doesn't necessarily have an end goal (gain knowledge, test a hypothesis, etc.) in mind.
On the other hand, if someone is always wrecking specific electronic devices you own because they want to know exactly how that works, but they never want to figure out how to make you a better tasting dinner, that might be state curiosity? :)
The lines are perhaps not super clear, though.
Have you ever seen videos of someone hearing for the first time in their lives, or read stories of people who develop depth perception in their mid-20s after watching 3D IMAX movies? They go through absolute bliss. They feel as if a gift had been given to them, and they can interact with the world in an entirely new way immediately afterwards; they couldn't even understand that this was a piece that's been missing.
Perhaps understanding can be thought of as a means of adding dimension to your perception field. To further map the example of gaining depth perception to understanding a concept: when one truly understands something, they can look at the world as a picture and expand it like a 3D image, then walk inside of it in their minds. When they understand more of it, the perception of the world becomes riddled with dimensions and perspectives to play with it.
Perhaps I'm /addicted/ to understanding. My job literally involves understanding firmware that other people wrote to find patterns which lead to security bugs and fix them, and I'm right in my zone every time I get to so intimately know a new piece of firmware. It's like walking through a huge castle with all of its secret corridors and the pipes behind the wall... reverse engineering eventually tells you a story about the architects as well.
I don't know if compulsion to understand is only one of the ways curiosity manifests itself or if this is something else entirely. Do you model this in your research? It feels a double-edged-sword kind of compulsion that happens to lead me out of some of my darkest moments in life (and, without proper care, thrust me right back into it). I'm aware of the causality ambiguity in this relationship, that's something I'm not completely sure about yet.
I hope this helps you with your research in some small way; my compulsion to understand is leading me to read it (and enter a dialogue through this comment).
This is very interesting, do you have any article discussing this that I could check out?
By self-learning, I want a person who digs beyond the surface and understands communication is fundamentally flawed as people are flawed. People do not communicate clearly. Sometimes on purpose. A "curious" person in my mind is comfortable with the confusion and actively tries to clear up the confusion and digs deep to truly understand what is really be asked, what is being said or not said.
I think I'm a little smart, but not too much higher-than-average. But because I constantly need to think about everything, I'm always exercising my brain, and working on problems that everyone else ignores half their day. I've known plenty of people way smarter than me that didn't achieve as much, because they just wanted to turn off and tune out. Drink some beer. Watch some mindless movies.
I'm going 24x7. So like the multi-billionaire CEO who's only in that position because he works 80hr/wk and never turns it off... I'm doing well in tech (and my hobbies!) because I just can't stop thinking about algorithms and solving problems. My hobbies and entertainment end up being highly-technical intensive thought-requiring activities.
Curiosity is also a trait I've got, but I suspect it's just a result of the high need for cognition. I find that I'm not that curious about things that don't make me think a lot.
tangentially, i have a friend who is a musician that was never "traditionally" smart. i suppose he was just never interested in any of the material, so he never really gave much of an effort. once he found music and discovered that he could orchestrate things on his computer, he fell into a rabbithole that he'll never come out of. learning really is all about engagement, something which sounds so obviously trite but so rarely ever implemented in early american education, at least in my experience.
But if you truly want to "master" something - then does "constantly thinking about problems" mean you will never benefit from the same 'compounding' effect as someone who has spent 3/5/10 years of their time on that problem?
Or - is all your "need for cognition" - mostly in one domain space (e.g. "Computer Science" or "database structure" etc)?
Cognition can be painful in a psyche impacted by a history of high stress. Read about substance P neurotransmitters and depression; chemical messages for physical pain are high in depressed patients, and yet there's nothing to indicate that there should be pain. Block the substance P neurotransmitters and you get an antidepressant.
So, I think there are repressive forces in addition to what you're describing above. Modeling the problem this way, it's easier to be optimistic and figure out societal machinery to promote more problem solving by addressing forces like stress; instead of TV watching and etc., since these habits are side-effects of other problems.
Through meditation, I've come to see that my own habit of thinking 24/7 was actually a means of escape for me. A way of numbing feelings and avoiding silence. In the years since I started to practice meditation my mind has become a lot more quiet and I no longer think about work things obsessively, I can switch off much more easily and conversely it's made me a lot better at knowing what is and isn't important to work on.
I do envy the people who seem to be able to stay on 24/7 without burning out, but part of me also wonders if there's still a limit to that and perhaps my limit is lower.
Instead, I feed off the endless energy they emit and try to make the most use of it. Perhaps some day I can figure out a cool trick to be a constant emitter, just like GGP.
My family shifted my priorities. Getting out of my own head to spend my time with them is more important.
I miss the obsessive all nighters sometimes, but the trade off is worth it.
I believe is what it was called. I worked as close to round the clock as possible for 3 full months once and was pretty sure I was having a heart attack.
Doctor told me that it wasn’t serious as long as I didn’t keep doing whatever I was doing.
Sorry that your were in that situation (working that much). I wonder if it was because you felt you had to, or:
>> I miss the obsessive all nighters
because you wanted to (eg working on one's own startup maybe)
I do not believe this narrative that is only confirmed by billionaires themselves. They mostly rely on the work in others for their success, why working more hours would even have an impact?
Example: An accountant who works 8h/d does very taxing, mental work. They require high concentration and precision, it’s often quite boring stuff, but still, they have to get things right, quickly, constantly.
A manager or director might effectively work more hours, but those hours typically have a much more natural rhythm to them. The vast majority of it is communication or preparing for such. The hard part is making the right decisions, listening learning (broad sense), but it’s not detailed and constant.
We programmers tend to complain when we have too many meetings and purely conceptual/communicative work, because it doesn’t „feel“ like work and getting things done, right? There’s a hint there.
For me, 3-4h of highly concentrated programming and testing is much more taxing than a full day of communication/learning. Much more.
Interesting example with the accountant: constant precision required, although monotonous. Not easy
Your path suits you and you find it satisfying, and I'm happy for you, but it's quite unkind to dismiss other people's choices to drink beer and watch movies instead of working. There are many paths to happiness besides your own.
You can read in a bit of judgment here.
But sure, we can say they achieved just as much (and possibly more) because they achieved contentedness or happiness or whatever, which is great for them, and they are just confused?
My biggest generic life advice for people is "Cultivate curiosity".
The first thing I ask about when people want to know if they should get into programming is how tenacious they are.
https://austinkleon.com/2021/10/04/a-blessed-unrest/
This is Agnes de Mille conversing with the great dancer Martha Graham:
> “But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”
> “No artist is pleased.”
> “But then there is no satisfaction?”
> “No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Also, I have had this discussion with my Dad, who is 93, and he always tells me how smart I am, of course he is my Dad, but I always tell him how wise he is and how much I want him to share his wisdom with me.
I suppose, most likely, the answer has something to do with where you are in life, but me, being 64, and my Dad being 93, I long for his wisdom. But, then I have nephews, in their 20's who wish for the wealth I have.
It's interesting. I wish I had some wisdom, or truth for you. Sorry. Just observations.
I am 27 and I often think about how to develop more wisdom for life, but it's difficult to find some good resources for it. A collection of wise quotes doesn't go really far in my opinion. The best thing I have found is just lots of introspection and reading books which have stood the test of time. But I wish there was a more straightforward way.
It's also amazing that in the world we live in currently, you can do very well by just not fucking up. EG: someone born in the 80s could just follow "best practices" their whole life so far and be fine - eg: get good grades, study a valuable major, don't eat garbage, don't marry crazy people/idiots, stay off dangerous drugs, and mainly show up to work, be clean and nice - and you can by now be a very successful 40 year old without really having had to innovate or take huge risks. It's amazing.
In a European country, think Spain, Italy, France, "get good grades, study a valuable major, don't eat garbage, don't marry crazy people/idiots, stay off dangerous drugs, and mainly show up to work, be clean and nice" and you are likely to end up with job paying 40 to 80k (before taxes) a year, which is not bad, but I consider that money far from financially making someone "a very successful 40-year-old".
With my STEM major and a PhD, I would have made between 40 and 50k per year before taxes.
So while I would agree that professional success should be measured on multiple scales, if you were to run a PCA on the multiple dimensions then income should be the largest principle component.
NOTE! I am speaking only of success in your career. However, since this is where most of your energies during your adult life go, it is a dominant factor in your success in other areas.
There might be a weak positive correlation at the population level between (broadly speaking) "being miserable/not having a good time/give up life for money" and "income", but at the individual level what we can say is that there are millions of people in the world making good to very good to great money while having the time of their lives day after day.
I might be one of those, for now. In the future, who knows.
As a person living in a (relatively for the western world) low-cost-of-living area, making a decent income for a low-cost-of-living area, it sometimes feels like a local maximum. It would take a sizeable income jump to offset low cost of housing. No doubt the top world cities are the place to be, in terms of all kinds of fun and opportunities, but lifestyle would be worse there unless or until you'd broken into a really high income bracket.
If a two-bedroom apartment goes for 200k and after taxes what I have is 25k or so, my financial situation, considering kids, car(s), aging parents and what we call life, would certainly not be one of unquestionable success.
"Sailing/horse riding/cars/light aircraft" would certainly be a stretch.
In particular; "Unit 731" was the worst of the worst (even the Nazis were repelled by them). They were granted immunity from prosecution by the Allies and were never held accountable for their unimaginably horrific crimes.
Smart is like a spice, it's great to add to something good to make it better. But it can't be the main thing.
You want to have a good enough mix but I would say, scoring high on any 3 of those should give nice results.
People boast about need to be hard working, having grit or how easy everything comes for attractive people.
Then there is a lot of people who focus on their strengths too much. Like if one is attractive already focusing on improving that will not bring much more to his life. Improving on hard working while being attractive that is going to bring some serious results. Improving on social skills while being hard working the same.
Just mix up some third trait and see how much one can achieve.
Of course one cannot work on "being at the right time at the right place" directly - but other traits if worked on can bring opportunities so like having better social skills can open some doors or make new friends that will have different connections.
I would even say that having 2 of those traits high can bring "being in the right time at the right place" into reality.
Thinking up wild and vivid scenarios in your mind and playing around with ideas and experimenting with concepts is how I've gotten through most of the traditionally difficult subjects I've encountered so far.
Examples:
> A lot of people say to me: “Ivaylo! You are so smart. Your newsletter is full of insights. The books you summarize are so elegantly presented with so much attention and care. Your parents must be proud!” To this, I always respond: “Thanks! I was simply born amazingly gifted.” And then I wake up. I’m kidding, of course. To be honest. I consider myself pretty ordinary in terms of smartness. Actually, the word I’m looking for is average. But there is one quality that helps me fight through my natural stupidity – my unfair advantage sort to say – I’m curious.
> So what’s the problem? It’s this: We spend more time consuming content instead of using the content we consume. And I’m not simply saying this because I think that I’m an omnipotent idol that knows everything. I’m saying this because I feel this way all the time myself. I get lost in the consuming stage – drowning in The Ambitions River – more often than I care to admit.
But not such deep rabbit holes that they would become economic losers!
> I personally know a lot of smart people. Some are really successful in terms of income and wealth. Others aren’t. The difference between the two types? The group of smart folks who fail to make a good living stand still.
Yep; they just don't dive into those money-making curiosity rabbit holes. Like what makes people tick. Specifically in those moments. When they make the important decision to part with their money. And give it to you.
For that matter, whats "smart"? Is it to score high on tests, work 8-8 job, and be called smart by everyone else? Or is it make good decisions, work the least amount possible and become super wealthy and retire earlier than everyone else?
Why be smart, if you'll be poor anyway? Would you choose to be less smart but more wealthy? (All rhetorical).
I have friends that range in "smartness" and I find no correlation to wealth outcomes. If anything, friends that are considered - or exhibit "naivety" - actually are more happy.
> I personally know a lot of smart people. Some are really successful in terms of income and wealth. Others aren’t.
> The difference between the two types?
It looks like the author is referring to the former.
Framing curiosity and smartness under that model: curiosity is your ability to add nodes, smart is your ability to make connections.
That is, curiosity produces knowledge, and smartness produces wisdom.
I really don't like the term "smart" because it is vague, anecdotally it typically means memory, but it can also relate a high level of creativity and problem solving ability as well. All of which I feel are aspects of an intellect.
The main vectors I see for general intelligence as I see it are:
memory/knowledge - here relating the number of nodes held on the graph
curiosity/learning - the rate at which nodes are added to the graph
abstraction/understanding - the ability to distill knowledge, almost like a hash map, but I think an ML model of some subset of nodes is a more accurate (but kinda cheating)approximation.
critical thinking - the window size with which you attempt to traverse the graph
creativity/problem-solving - the ability to formulate rules for a novel traversal of the graph
logic/reasoning - the ability to traverse the graph in an efficient manner and give the right output
astuteness - the ability to recognize nodes that don't belong or are missing on the traversal
self-awareness - indexing the contents of your graph and relating it to all possible nodes, also your understanding of what all possible nodes represents.
Then there are higher level abstractions, wisdom is the confluence of a high level of understanding, critical thinking, reasoning, astuteness and self-awareness. Smarts is some impressive combination of knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving and reasoning.
Fun stuff!
I also think however, that there is value in not being curious. The author talks about how someone with a degree may be smart not curious. But actually, it's very valuable for someone with a degree not to be curious in some cases. At some point we draw the line between learning and application, and if you are always learning, always curious, you do literally have the possibility of never using the things you learned. I really enjoyed starting a new job a few years ago- not because I was curious - but because if it offered me the opportunity to get my head down and use all that knowledge I'd accrued. I'm not an incurious person, but curiousity isn't an end in itself.
Neither is objectively better- I just wish more people would focus on self-awareness and reflection than comparing themselves to others. All of us have lessons to learn.
And if I may indulge my own biographical fiction thinking, I think his secret is that nobody believes that he is lying to them. Everybody believes anything he says. Nobody trusts a genius. And there is the paradox, a genius can never convince anybody of anything, but a simpleton can convince everybody of everything (e.g. The Usual Suspects).
But, so far, this hasn't made anyone think I'm really smart. :/
What this article means is that you should be curious about things relating to work so you can have a good career instead of getting left behind. Sounds boring to me, I'd rather people have a wide range of curiosities, diversity is more interesting.
I agree with the "humiliating experience" comments below, but how to curate that? One way is put yourself in a challenging environment you (and others) have to confront coming up short consistently.
EG: enter an academic program that isn't up your alley (eg, introverted dev? do an MBA.. You'll learn a lot besides the academics.) Afraid of confrontation? Try to become a manager and watch how you are forced to evolve your backbone. Also, try to get a job at FAANGs or other competitive places. Even failing interviews will teach you - where and why am I failing? Is it tech, communication, composure, etc? Even, try to date beautiful, kind people. Are they going for you - if not, what is it about you that's problematic? etc.
It's a tough way to live in the moment, but it's awesome in retrospect. You evolve and achieve what you would not have - but at any given time you may be more focused on what's holding you back from the next level..
For me "smart" is not just IQ, it is a set of things that make people successful in what they want to do includes raw intelligence but also education, people skills,... and curiosity, so it is part of it. "Rain men" are usually not called "smart" (except when compared to other autists) even if they can show almost superhuman feats of intelligence.
Things like changing jobs, getting a new hobby, giving presentations it is things like this that if you figure out these kind of things it can have a big impact on your life.
is very hard to read
why?
too many paragraphs
I get it
it wants to read a bit like train of thought
but ultimately
it just makes the message harder to get across
Simone Weil
Tell about "limits" to someone "in a tiny cage": it takes "a decently sized cage" to see its limits.
I always loved this passage from Hitchhikers:
> For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
Is a smart person who scratches his or her own itches and lives a happy life unproductive if scratching those itches doesn't produce things (accomplishments, wealth, etc.) that are visible to and valued by others?
Like one guy who decided that being a real estate agent was the path to success. He studied for and aced the exam to get a license with ease. He quit after a few weeks of discovering that being a successful agent required focused effort, and went back to living hand to mouth.
His life was a sequence of one scheme like that after another, until he passed away young from neglecting his health.
It still pains me to recount this, he was a good guy.
Success and failure aren't always about money and the kind of accomplishments that society values most.
This is well established in divulgation: I'd say, Daniel Goleman, Focus (2013).
Emotional Intelligence: "It's not the dry smarts of IQ, it's the smarts in understanding others".
Focus: "It's not the smarts, it's the grit".
(...to determine/predict success.)
Intelligence I guess you can be born with, but you don’t get smart without effort, and curiosity is about the biggest forward driver you’ll find.
Smart and not curious: who knows? psychopath?
Both: fun person to talk to at a party
A fantastic book and also a great way of life. Be curious and be successful!
GG&S makes the case, that people say "Necessity is the mother of invention." but historically this hasn't been true. The best inventions were random findings and only got applied to the best use after they have been found.
TGP makes the case, that people who are smart (sociopaths) are able to extract the most benefit of a specific situation.
If a group of people doesn't have curious individuals, the smart ones don't have any basis to use it to their (groups) advantage.
The author was not curious enough about this essay's spellcheck squiggles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748374
mad skills
Smarter and smart are not the same thing.
"Smart" is a point-in-time inference by a perceiver as an impression of a performant interaction. The reality is messy: multidimensional, inconsistent, and relative.
"Curiosity" alone has no value without intelligence to navigate ambiguities, reconcile new data, and propose new inductions and deductions.
There also seems to be an emotional aspect to it - I know some pretty smart people who always trip on bullshit that evokes emotions.
Looking up ADHD and going the "these people are geniuses" path (most aren't), or looking up Covid vaccine information and focusing on the negative effects (most don't have them). That kinda shit.
If the idea that some people are prewired to believe conspiracy theories is true, that could explain it. There's just not as much excitement in the mundane, I guess.
Of course, the government being out to get you is more interesting than them being unbelievably incompetent.
"science is a symphony of ongoing fractal rhizomatically-connected feedback loops. something happens and humans go "oh shit, what was that?". then we ask questions and then through making theories and testing them (designing feedback and sub-feedback loops) slowly we understand a new emerging pattern. 1.) the universe responds to something in a new way we hadn't seen before, 2.) we document it, we repeat it to make sure the universe ain't fucking with us, and 3.) that's a completed feedback loop we can pass on: knowledge. we rinse and repeat for more, to infinity, slowly reverse-engineering all the beautiful natural phenomena. this product, our new actionable knowledge, is technology: if i hit these rocks together i get a fire; if i put round tree trunks under some heavy thing i can then roll the thing on top of it very easily ("wow, we can move rocks and make pyramids, here we go!..." "oh fuck, the slavery/misery...") etc., a continuing evolution right into the modern world. billions and trillions of feedback loops. neverending feedback loops. feedback loops racing at us from the past, intertwined with the thousands of open feedback loops revealing themselves today.
but what has happened to science under capitalism?
since the 1970's especially, the propertied class [...] has been pushing for global systems for intellectual property 'protection'. what does this mean? they want to spread their mind virus to make you think they are your baby daddy. they want you to put them high on the pedestal. to have you think they are unique inventors who have survived their deathly privileged upbringings, not cheaters who stole feedback loops from the commons."
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle/comments/pvlc...