90. Curiosity vs Interest 🔗

Some people seem to have 100% interests and 0% curiosities. You can be a good advocate with that personality, but not really a researcher.

Interest is about the values of the subject, curiosity is about attributes of the object that can evoke interest in someone, not necessarily you. There’s a whole dynamic of

“What are you looking for”

“I’ll know when I find it”

To curiosity

Curious people necessarily have somewhat flighty attention because the yield of interestingness that captures their interest is low.

Conversely, they’re interested (ie value) in what others do by default because they recognize it might yield interestingness for them

Never met a good researcher who is highly possessive of their own curiosities and default indifferent or hostile to others curiosities. It’s like going to the market with goods and money but determined not to buy/sell. Curiosity doesn’t work that way, but established interests do

Interests are zero sum at best, usually negative sum. You can only see things that already have established value (positive/negative) to you. Curiosities can be positive-sum. The most interesting things uncovered by curiosity have aspects that are interesting to almost everybody.

Not quite, more like pre-valuation/post-valuation modes of engagement.

I’m curious about what the James Webb telescope might see, but may or may not find it interesting once it is revealed

I’m interested in the stock price of Tesla tweet^[1]

Any new thing you uncover will have broad or narrow interest once it’s uncovered. X% will find it positively interesting, Y% will be indifferent, Z% will find it negatively interesting (ie see reasons to be hostile)

For fertile discoveries, eg wheel, X>>Y>>Z>0

Z is never zero

Fertile discoveries proliferate and spawn more discoveries because many people are positively interested in them from many angles for many reasons, and trade ideas with each other. The generative vigor is a mark of the original idea being high interestingness, not a conspiracy.

When X>>Y>>Z, ideas kinda explode in revolutionary ways. When they don’t, all the money and top-down power in the world won’t make fetch happen

A clear tell of a person with 100% interests, 0% curiosity is that they resent such outcomes and act like attention allocation is entirely a function of money and “ought” to be reallocated to favor their prefigured interests. A social determinist command economy mindset.

The history of discovery is littered with command economies trying to make fetch happen by moving money around. It’s not entirely ineffective — it’s just a force that’s completely overwhelmed by intrinsic interestingness-generativity of new things in the world

Trying to fight the natural interestingness patterns of what nature reveals, one piece at a time, (which has unfortunately come to be known as ‘what technology wants’) is a kind of deep hubris. Ironically, the accusations of hubris usually go the other way.

It’s not that money doesn’t matter. It matters a LOT. It’s just that it has massively amplified effects when it follows the natural grain of interestingness revealed by open curiosity and efficiently wasted when it tries to follow “interests”

I generally flip the bozobit on a person if they reach for the zero-sum complaint: “attention to X is detracting attention from Y”

It means they’ve never stopped to ponder the attention dynamics of interests and curiosities, or even looked at the world without an agenda.

Sure, it takes surplus attention, a kind of abundance born of privilege which may or may not be deserved, to be curious without a governing interest, but being mad at that and expecting scarcity to have the same effects as abundance is… weird.

For better or worse, the world evolves when people get curious about something and decide to fuck around and find out what happens when you poke at it. And yes sometimes the people who fuck around aren’t the people who find out. But nobody has yet found a better way.

This thread is both a long subtweet of a specific provocation, and thoughts on a repeated pattern of interests without curiosities that is kinda endemic in modernity. This pattern has a right to exist of course. You just have a right to ignore it and play in the curiosity economy

Curiosity doesn’t preclude obsessiveness, in fact the two feeding on each other is what makes for generativity tweet^[2]

Tldr: What you’re curious about will nearly always lead to something of interest to somebody, even if it’s not you and you vacant find them

What you’re merely interested in will usually lead to nothing of interest to anybody

Feed only your curiosities and your interests will often take care of themselves and you might even generate surpluses to look out for the interests of others who might lack the resources for curiosity

But feed only your interests and you’ll starve both curiosities and interests

Academia would get 10x more interesting in 5 years if they asked faculty candidates for statements of research curiosities rather than statements of research interests

When you know both the likely valence and magnitude of the outcome of an uncertain action, you’re solving a problem

When you know the valence but not the magnitude you’re pursuing an interest

When you know neither, you’re pursuing a curiosity

Archetypes: insect, dog, cat

This train of thought are me realize why I think “bring your whole self to work” is bs. It is code for “bring all your established interests, leave your curiosities behind” because your curiosities are your incompletions; ways in which you are not whole

If you have many curiosities, in the context of those curiosities, you’ll always look like an absurd cartoon. If you leave them out, you’ll look like a different sort of grim caricature, defined entirely by interests. A set of representations without an actual live presence.

This is why sitcoms are better than dramas

QED