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Comment by rthrfrd | Hacker News Reader

I think what's interesting/telling is you view (3) as less desirable.

Alternatively, you could have spent that half hour on the train exercising your own creativity to try and satisfy your curiosity. Whether you're right or wrong doesn't really matter, because as you acknowledge it's not really important enough to you to matter. Picking (2) eliminates all the possible avenues that might have lead you down.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that you're approaching the criticism on the basis of axioms that represent a narrow viewpoint: That of someone who has to be "right" about the things they are curious about, no matter how trivial.

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I think one of my personal core values is that curiosity should never be left unsatiated if ant all possible!

I spent my half hour on the train satiating all sorts of other things instead (like the identity of that curious looking building in Reading).

> Picking (2) eliminates all the possible avenues that might have lead you down.

I don't think that's the case. Using GPT-5 for the Cake Pop question lead me down a bunch of avenues I may never have encountered otherwise - the structure of Starbucks in the UK, the history of their Cake Pops rollout, the fact that checking nutritional and allergy details on their website is a great way to get an "official" list of their products independent of what's on sale in individual stores, and it sparked me to run a separate search for their Cookies and Cream cake pop and find out had been discontinued in the US.

Not bad for typing a couple of prompts on my phone and then spending a few extra minutes with the results after the research task had completed.

Now multiply that by a dozen plus moments of curiosity per day and my intellectual life feels genuinely elevated - I'm being exposed to so many more interesting and varied avenues than if I was manually doing all of the work on a smaller number of curiosities myself.

> I think one of my personal core values is that curiosity should never be left unsatiated if ant all possible!

I don't disagree: I just posited that there are other ways to satisfy it, and that there is an opportunity cost to the path you've chosen to satisfy it that you don't seem very aware of, because your curiosity and desire to be correct are tightly coupled - but that doesn't actually have to be the case. It has its pros and cons.

Now I'm more of an "it's the journey not the destination" guy, so accelerating the journey doesn't appeal to me as much as it used to, because for me its where I get the most value. That change in my perspective is what motivated me to comment.

But anyway, you clearly enjoy it and do great work, so all the best with it!

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