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
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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.
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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”
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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.
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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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Replying to
Any wise thoughts on how to ignite curiosity in, say, a hypothetical 15 yo presently consumed with phone/tv entertainment?
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