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Comment by norea-armozel | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I never understood why people aren't more curious. I'm always looking for articles about how things are made, the history of given locations, and whatever just seems interesting. I never see anyone else with a marginally equivalent level of curiosity especially for my age (mid-30s). Seems like people get swallowed whole by their social lives and careers.

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These days asking questions of an expert usually gets you a response of JFGI, but learning used to be equal parts "learning the actual thing" and "having fun and stimulating conversations with like-minded people" so without the latter, curiosity is less rewarding these days. That's why it's important for those with knowledge to give back to the community by giving of their time. CoderDojo for example

Having said that, learning has ALWAYS involved a lot of solitude and independent research - it's just that "levelling up" used to REQUIRE asking other people for advice, input and tips, whereas with the Internet it's practically expected for people to never ask for help.

Basically, back in the old days, a novice asking "explain this to me" was met with "ah! a fellow academic! how rare! OK here's how it is" whereas today it's met with "google exists for a reason".

Humans beings are motivated by social stimuli

> These days asking questions of an expert usually gets you a response of JFGI

To me it seems that most people I ask questions of are happy to respond. But the key thing being that the ease of asking people questions means that you need to ask people questions they haven't heard a thousand times and written a book about. And that you can easily answer with Google.

It's lazy ad insulting if you e-mail and ask something you'd find a whole article about on the persons site, for example, because it implies you couldn't be bothered to even see they've already written about the subject, and don't respect their time.

But if you ask about the finer points of something they've written, on the other hand, they are more likely to be flattered, intrigued or at least willing to point you in the right direction.

What makes you think they aren't as curious as you?

They might just be into different subjects. Plus, if there's nothing that suggests that you might be interested, they might self-censor comments about their own hobby subjects when talking to you.

I think theres a pretty obvious difference between da Vinci-esque broad-reaching intrigue and just having a certain set of hobbies.

I think you can determine how curious you are relative to other people in general by roughly keeping track of how often you are interested in other people's hobbies versus how often they are interested in yours. It won't tell you anything about a particular person, but over a year, if you're interested in other people's hobbies daily and other people never care about yours, it's safe to assume that you're more curious than the average person.

I was going to add that this only works if your hobbies are fairly normal hobbies, but wouldn't it also be safe to assume that you're more curious than normal if you have a bunch of normal hobbies in addition to a bunch of unusual hobbies that no one wants to talk about?

I think it's not that they're uncurious but that maybe their lives are full of a routine that limits acting on it hence why I said they get swallowed whole by their daily lives.

You would enjoy James Burke's Connections series. It is curiosity driven.

There are very few Renaissance men (and women) around today. I've met a startling number of people who spend time online but never encountered Wikipedia, there is also very large number of university students who have no interest in reading. This goes to show it is not about access to information or elite institutions.

That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It is probably more worthwhile because fewer people are doing it. One prominent example among ourselves is Gwern, he is a great example to us. A lot of the most interesting threads on HN are where the discussion is regarding something not obviously connected to programming, such as woodworking. The most famous AMA in Reddit's history was a vacuum cleaner salesman, which was fascinating and bolstered my regard for Redditors as a healthy if fractious community with a native curiosity not evident on most social networking sites. In my opinion the best people have a mixture of useful values from different social classes - working, middle, upper. LessWrong has an expression parallel to this I'll paraphrase as 'hold your identity loosely'.

If anybody feels like they're stuck in a rut, unmotivated to be 'curiosity-productive', check out 'Japanology' on Youtube. Peter Barakan could make anything interesting. I always get a lift after watching his documentaries.

I completely agree — for me it was always the attraction of of hypertext, of the internet. Every term, concept or media, explorable. Practically infinitely-so.

What went wrong?

(well, aside from the internet becoming largely one-way and unmodifiable by the masses.. but there's no real solution for 'that' (whatever that is) yet).

> aside from the internet becoming largely one-way and unmodifiable by the masses

If anything, it's as easy as ever to share knowledge. Just because the barrier to entry is now creating value on other people's websites instead of figuring out how to set up and promote your own doesn't mean its not easier.

> I never see anyone else with a marginally equivalent level of curiosity especially for my age (mid-30s)

I'm in my early 30s, and the combination of work and having a very young child certainly puts an upper bound on the available free time and energy you have in any given day.

I hear ya.

Yep. I think that is the spirit of HN's "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." in the guidelines.

I love the articles about odd but interesting things, or deep dives in "foreign" worlds.

I agree. I definitely feel less curious as I've gotten older. One angle is - given how easy it is to access information, curiosity is more often a distraction than a benefit.

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