Conversation

If you're reasonably open to experience, intelligent, and good at pattern matching, you'll arrive at a "seen it all" plateau by about age 35-50. It won't be true, but it will feel like it. Genuine, category/pattern busting surprise is harder to find past a point in our universe
20
299
People think this is not true because they conflate surprisal with unpredictability. They're not the same. I can't predict a sequence of coin tosses, but almost no sequence of heads/tails would surprise me. It would take something like tosses producing pi in binary to do that
3
49
When you're a baby, surprise is a continuous state. When you're young, it comes overwhelmingly torrentially and you have to affect unflappability to seem cool. But by the time you're about 35, if you like surprise, a certain desperation to seek it out will creep into your life
1
66
Surprisal is a cognitive addiction of course, and a good one. But the hits get harder to produce. By 40, fracking surprise out of the universe turns into an advanced cognitive skill.
3
63
Replying to
Is plateauing beyond surprise desirable? Net positive? Or negative? Is there an ideal trajectory toward the plateau that acquires useful knowledge quickly enough without exhausting the motivating drive of surprise until beyond productive years? Or OK to mash the accelerator?
1
Replying to
Ymmv but to me surprise is central to the point of life. Being beyond surprise is not very different from being dead. Again people fetishize the ritualized life expecting more meaning out of it than it can deliver.