Curiosity Killed
Paul Graham has written a new essay called What You'll Wish You'd Known which is a primer for kids going through high school. I know that Paul would have inspired me in high school but I also know that he caters to the ambitious/nerdy audience a lot more than he might to other genres of high school student.
I found his comments on curiosity interesting:
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
School was never particularly boring for me because I was the curious type. I had great teachers who added life to our subjects; history into a narrative in which you wanted to find out what happened, math was a set of interesting novelties like pi.
Now as an adult it seems that curiosity is frown upon. It's a stage of life when pursuing certain types of things seems impractical1 to be sure, but even being curious is treated as impractical or abnormal. I own a lot of books related to my work and some people make the comment "You're really into your job" which seems a bit absurd to me; of course I'm into my job, I have to do it at least 8 hours a day2.
Everything seems upside down to me when it comes to curiosity. Sometimes I'll see a person in a bookstore cafe, just looking into space blankly when they are surrounded by thousands of books covering almost any topic they could dream up. Other times I'm on a plane wondering about the people that sit there looking into the back of the seat in front of them, zoning out for hours without sleeping. But this is normal compared to a person you talk to that mentions an interest in something like psychology or physics. Most often I hear the curious described as having "a lot of time on their hands."
It's a bit of a sham but I hide my curiosity these days. Work related curiosity is tolerable (if "abnormal") to some, but if I were to just randomly start studying game theory, I think most would just shrug without understanding: "what a wierdo."
1I met a guy in Hollywood once who claimed he was an actor, track athelete, pop musician, and model.
2I can imagine hating a job; I was an accountant once. Ask for a person with a crushed spirit and I'll show you a person who hates their job.
2:23:55 PM 
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