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.
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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.
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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
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Curiosity doesn’t preclude obsessiveness, in fact the two feeding on each other is what makes for generativity
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Replying to @vgr
on the other hand lots of things were discovered by obsessives. heliocentrism for instance. persistent obsessiveness resulting even in death.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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when we bring our whole selfs to work (including curiosities which are messy and non commodifiable) can we begin to develop trust / maybe connection only happens through curiosities -
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I think trust emerges through shared pursuit of curiosities through some risk. If there’s a mystery box that might contain either gold or coal on the other side of a dragon it will take 2 people to kill, and we take it on together… that’s trust, whatever the box contains.
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I am really influenced by this thread because I hope I have curiosities and not interests -
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