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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

First, thanks for the interesting take.

It kinda made me wonder why I felt so uncomfortable reading it, and I think it's the very deep religious philosophy that shines from it.

Curiosity is fundamentally a desire to discover things by one-self and uncover hidden things. It goes against authoritative advice ("kills the cat") and is self motivated. It is basically the opposite of blind trust, faith. A vice.

Studiousness was the core virtue of monks, and they were the spearhead of shuting down distractions to focus on a single goal.

This is basically the advice we'd give to people to stop looking at the birds, to focus on plowing the field in front of them.

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If it makes you feel better, Aristotle talks about the same thing, as does Socrates, in the same books where they argue against the blind trust/faith in many things.

We also use the word curiosity slightly differently - the older form is found in "curiosity killed the cat". The ancient philosophy term that would be closer to what we may mean by curiosity now is wonder.

And thanks to monk studiousness, hundreds of classical books were preserved during the dark ages, after Rome fell. We also got a lot of technology preserved and actively invented by them.

Some monks and monasteries in general were of course pretty inventive and contributed to technology advancement. Yet I think those were fundamentally incremental and were more based in craftsmanship than in field shifting insights.

For instance during the “dark ages” we saw construction technique leap forward (think cathedrals like Paris’ one), accounting techniques saw the shift to double entry book-keeping, and so many deeply impacting innovations that didn’t cone from monks while they were supposed to have such knowledge and education.

You mention classical books reproduction which was a important occupation for monks, yet the printing revolution came from a completely different direction. Not rocking the boat was a principle they adhered to that basically tied their hand.

> This is basically the advice we'd give to people to stop looking at the birds, to focus on plowing the field in front of them.

I think you leaped to a conclusion here. Parent post is about immoderate distraction, not having horse blinders on 24/7. There is plenty of room to “look at the birds” while also knowing how to say “no” to distraction.

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