I occasionally feel pride in not knowing some piece of popular culture, like which celebrity married whom or what movies some actress was in. This is mostly reason 2, signalling my identification with contrarian groups that don’t care about such things. There’s also an element of pride that I have good priorities about what to learn. There was a quote on here that I can’t find again, along the lines of, “people ask how I know so much about science and so little about celebrities, but they never see the connection between the two.”
There’s a balance. You shouldn’t let yourself be made to feel awful about not knowing which celebrity is supposedly sleeping with who, etc, to the point where you move a lot of time away from learning other things toward learning that. Pride in your priorities would help to avoid that. At the same time, I certainly agree that getting carried away and purposely avoiding such knowledge is unlikely to be helpful—and some of us no doubt need to temper the tendency.
I occasionally feel pride in not knowing some piece of popular culture, like which celebrity married whom or what movies some actress was in. This is mostly reason 2, signalling my identification with contrarian groups that don’t care about such things. There’s also an element of pride that I have good priorities about what to learn. There was a quote on here that I can’t find again, along the lines of, “people ask how I know so much about science and so little about celebrities, but they never see the connection between the two.”
I always try to temper this sort of pride with It’s never cool to not know something.
Thanks for the link; it’s a good one. I don’t actively avoid information, but I’m still happy when I discover that I don’t know a celebrity fact.
There’s a balance. You shouldn’t let yourself be made to feel awful about not knowing which celebrity is supposedly sleeping with who, etc, to the point where you move a lot of time away from learning other things toward learning that. Pride in your priorities would help to avoid that. At the same time, I certainly agree that getting carried away and purposely avoiding such knowledge is unlikely to be helpful—and some of us no doubt need to temper the tendency.