I hold the opinion that one should be curious about everything but some things only superficially. If you dig deep into something, it changes the experience of it. There’s something to be said about being intimately familiar with a subject.
Forcing yourself to be curious about every single thing that crosses your path is a good way to make yourself uncomfortable. I consider discomfort of that kind to be good practice when it comes to confronting the possibility I may be wrong about something.
I guess I have trouble living up to that ideal, but at the same time I have learned to be uncomfortable with being too comfortable. I worry that too much anti-curiosity would lead to too much comfort.
One should also know everything, but clearly that’s impossible.
There are some areas of knowledge that are so unlikely to yield anything useful that it’s not worth spending any time being curious about them. For humanity in general, psi phenomena now fall into this category. There was a time when they didn’t, but it’s safe to say that time is over. For me as an individual, string theory falls into that category. I’m glad there are some people investigating it, but the effort required for me to have anything but a superficial understanding of the topic is extremely unlikely to help me achieve anything.
I hold the opinion that one should be curious about everything but some things only superficially. If you dig deep into something, it changes the experience of it. There’s something to be said about being intimately familiar with a subject.
Forcing yourself to be curious about every single thing that crosses your path is a good way to make yourself uncomfortable. I consider discomfort of that kind to be good practice when it comes to confronting the possibility I may be wrong about something.
I guess I have trouble living up to that ideal, but at the same time I have learned to be uncomfortable with being too comfortable. I worry that too much anti-curiosity would lead to too much comfort.
One should also know everything, but clearly that’s impossible.
There are some areas of knowledge that are so unlikely to yield anything useful that it’s not worth spending any time being curious about them. For humanity in general, psi phenomena now fall into this category. There was a time when they didn’t, but it’s safe to say that time is over. For me as an individual, string theory falls into that category. I’m glad there are some people investigating it, but the effort required for me to have anything but a superficial understanding of the topic is extremely unlikely to help me achieve anything.
Too much anti-curiosity can easily lead to too much comfort, which is why I suggest periodic uncomfortable examination of areas of anti-curiosity.