https://readingbyeugene.com/2014/08/26/book-review-ian-leslies-curious-the-desire-to-knowand-why-your-future-depends-on-it/
1. why are so many of us allowing our curiosity to wane, when there is evidence that
those who are curious tend to be more creative, more intelligent, and more
successful?
2. Leslie points out that an important input into the curiosity output is the behavior of
people around us – if our curiosity is ignited, it grows; on the other hand, if our
curiosity is squashed at a point in time, curiosity may wane over the long term.
3. curiosity zone is a function of surprise, knowledge, and confidence. Curiosity is
highest when the violation of an expectation is more than tiny but less than
enormous. When violations are minor, we are quick to ignore them.
4. In a chapter titled “Puzzles and Mysteries,” Leslie describes how curiosity may
naturally wane as we grow older: it is important to have an environment that is
conducive to curious thinking. Curiosity requires an edge of uncertainty to thrive; too
much uncertainty, and it freezes.
5. A good anecdote is presented in the “Puzzles and Mysteries”:
6. What’s the one company that is doing everything it can to deprive you of the itch of
curiosity? Google. Because according to Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, they are working toward the ambition of incorporating search into people’s
brains. All information gaps will be closed.
7. if you were to ask someone “Is the Internet making us stupid or more intelligent,”
Leslie’s response would be a simple “Yes.”
8. He writes: The Internet presents us with more opportunities to learn than ever before
and also allows us not to bother.
9. Leslie highlights the importance of epistemic knowledge, and provides evidence to
debunk some of the “twenty-first century” mindset. Leslie presents three
misapprehensions about learning, common to the supporters of “curiosity-driven”
education:
10. the more you know, the more curious you become, the more knowledgeable you
become over time because you seek to gain more knowledge through your curiosity.
11. Leslie outlines seven ways to stay curious.
https://rosehendricks.com/2016/03/13/curious-the-desire-to-know-and-why-your-future-dependson-it-review/
https://siuhongyu.net/2016/07/07/curious-the-desire-to-know-and-why-your-future-depends-onit-a-book-review/
1.
2.
3.
How Curiosity works (Pages 24 - 67)
The curiosity divide (Pages 67 - 125)
Staying curious (Pages 125 - 163)
PART 1 How Curiosity Works
Chapter 1: 3 Journeys (24 - 36)
1.
(24 - 27) In the 1960s Brian Smith was growing up in an apartment over a shoe store
in a poor but lively neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri.
a.
Brian had DIVERSIVE CURIOSITY played with gun and shot it.
2.
(27 – 29) When he was 38, Alexander Arguelles concluded, regretfully, that he knew
too many languages.
a.
Learning many languages
3.
(29 – 30) The stories of Brian Smith and Alexander Arguelles appear to have little in
common.
a.
2 sides of curiosity; DIVERSIVE & EPISTEMIC
B.
diversive curiosity turning into deeper epistemic curiosity
4.
(30 – 32) Imagine a human hunter, armed only with a rudimentary stone weapon
such as a slingshot, looking for an animal to kill and eat.
a.
Knowing stuff was always important for human survival; developed ability to store more
info, info useful for many generations.
5.
(32 – 35) About 60,000 years ago, a small population of humans journeyed out of
Africa and struck out for the unknown.
a.
Epistemic curiosity—a desire for cultural
information—was one of the traits that enabled humans not just to journey out of
Africa but to put down roots in every corner of the world. Diversive curiosity
makes us want to know what lies on the other side of the mountain; epistemic
curiosity arms us with the knowledge we need to survive when we get there.
Chapter 2: How Curiosity Begins (36 - 46)
6.
(36- 38) If you were Deciding which of the world’s neighborhoods scores highest for
epistemic curiosity, Bloomsbury in London would be a strong candidate.
a.
Baby research for curiosity; investigating origins of EPISTEMIC CURIOSITY.
b.
Trying to figure out when epistemic curiosity is started from diversive curiosity
7. (38 - 40)
Imagine a group of parents from different species getting together for coffee
and discussing the progress of their offspring.
a.
When children become interested in whats other peoples minds is when EMPATHIC
CURISIOTY begins.
b.
Getting cultural info and learn to express themselves, learn about right and wrong,
acceptable and unacceptable.
8. (40 - 42)
Begus and Gliga are seeking to unlock one of the mysteries of child
development--why some babies grow into highly curious children and others don’t.
a.
Experiment with babies highly curious or incurious depends on how their parents
responded to early unspoken queries
B. Curiosity is a feedback loop.
B. curiosity supercharges learning
9. (42 - 46)
In most ways, children become more independent of adults as they grow
older.
a.
Adults become more important to children as time goes by.
b.
Children ask a lot of questions to get info from adults
c.
Children get older; ask for explanations not just info
d.
Until age of about 30 months children mostly ask what and where
e.
Around 3rd birthday start to ask how and why; for explanations
f.
Ages 2-5 children ask around 40k explanatory questions
g.
Adults get smarter, have knowledge and more curious when they ask questions,
especially a questions requires a complex mental process.
h.
Ian says that it's easy to distract children with technology rather than make them be
curious.
i.
Ignoring children's questions; stunting her desire to know.
Chapter 3: Puzzles and Mysteries ( 46 - 66)
10.
Henry James remarked, wistfully, that “our purely intellecutal zeal” ebbs as we
become adults
A.
At some point adults get less curious, could start from age 4
B.
As an adults, we become more lazy. However, waning of curiosity is not necessarily a
bad thing.
C.
It’s important to understand how curiosity works.
D.
According to Piaget’s theory, curiosity follows the curve of an inverted U: Curiosity is at
its highest when the violation of an expectation is more than tiny and less than enormous.
E.
According to Loewenstein, curiosity is a response to an information gap.
11.
BORN IN SALFORD, NEAR MANCHESTER, IN 1924, AND EDUCATED
a.
Berlyne was interested in why people get interested in things, and in particular why they
get interested in “the strange, the unusual, the puzzling.”
b.
He found that if people were presented with simple shapes, they would barely glance at
them before getting bored. They would spend more time gazing at the shapes if they were more
complex. But if the patterns were extremely complex, people didn’t spend much time on them,
either.
c.
Loewenstein built his information-gap theory out of Berlyne’s insight. He proposed,
fuels curiosity by creating awareness of ignorance, which gives rise to a desire to know more. As
soon as we know something about a subject, we start to become uncomfortably aware of what
we don’t know, and that makes us want to close the gap.
d.
Loewenstein described a study in which subjects sat in front of computer screens that
were divided into a grid of forty-five blank squares.
12.
In order to feel curious--to feel the desire to close an info gap--you have to be aware
of a gap in your knowledge in the first place.
a.
The dynamic between overconfidence and underconfidence equally applies to adult life.
13.
a.
b.
Curiosity has been called “The knowledge emotion.”
curiosity is emotionally complex
Curiosity is underwritten by love.
14.
Information gaps make good bait. When you read about a murder and you don’t
know who committed it, your curiosity is aroused.
A.
Curiosity is about more than the hunt for missing information
B.
your annoyance is significant, because it points to a gap in Loewenstein theory of
information gaps.
15.
Loewenstein’s definition of curiosity is powerful, but it’s even more useful with a
modification.
a.
It’s a very different feeling from the one you get when you’re trying to fill in the last clue
in a crossword puzzle. The frustration you felt when you were searching for the answer is
replaced by satisfaction.
b.
Puzzles tend to be how many or where questions; We have a tendency to prioritize
puzzles over mysteries, because we know they can be solved.
c.
mysteries are more likely to be why or how.
d.
Puzzles and mysteries correspond to different types of curiosity.
e.
Great scientists and inventors think in terms of mysteries rather than puzzles
f.
FACT: We live in a culture that is keener on puzzles than mysteries.
g.
School - students, life - politicians , work - businesspeople, the media; tend to solve
problems as playing puzzles.
h.
Google can give us the powerful illusion that all questions have definite answers.
i.
Puzzles offer us the satisfaction of answering a question even while you’re missing the
point completely.
j.
Mysteries are more challenging, but more sustaining. They inspire long-term curiosity by
keeping us focused on what we don’t know. They keep us feeling “alive and active” even as we
work in the darkness
k.
We need to resist this cultural pressure. Puzzles offer us the satisfaction of answering a
question even while you’re missing the point completely.
16.
In the final assignment of 3rd grade, jack was asked to research the anaconda.
Part 2: The Curiosity Divide
Chapter 4: Three Ages of Curiosity (68 - 82)
1.
The way we think about curiosity has been anything but stable.
2. THE AGE OF QUESTIONS
a. Gutenberg’s printing press was a curiosity machine; rapid spread and exchange of
ideas, along with new ideas.
b. a lot of people learning new info by learning newspapers.
3.
In parallel with the rise of epistemic curiosity, another kind of curiosity was
burgeoning—curiosity about the thoughts and feelings of others, including those very
different from oneself.
a. Rise in EMPATHIC curiosity was literature: fiction, drama, and poetry.
b. William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei (1564) born in same year;
1. Considered to be fouding figures of empathic and epistemic curiosity.
2. Around same time Sir Francis Bacon—codified the scientific method.
4. THE AGE OF ANSWERS
5.
In 1945 Vannevar Bush, director of the US office of scientific research, published an
essay in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “As We May Think.”
a. expressed concern that worlds knowledge growing too fast.
6.
One day in 1945, a man named percy spencer was touring one of the labs he
managed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar tech to allied forces
fighting 2nd world war.
7. The question “What do I need to learn?” Isn’t hard to answer; we’re programmed with
some of the answer by our DNA, and we know from birth that it’s important to learn how
to eat, or to decode and eventually reproduce those funny noises our parents make with
their mouths.
1. Talking about web, easy to search and get answers quickly
Chapter 5: The Curiosity Dividend (83 - 90)
1.
Education is the single biggest faction in determining whether individuals are likely
to prosper in today’s world.
a.
2.
If Vannevar Bush had been allowed to drop in on the 21st century, he may have been
simultaneously excited and disappointed.
a.
3.
The only sensible answer to the question “Is the internet making us stupid or more
intelligent?” is “Yes.”
a.
4.
John Dewey, The American Philosopher and educationalist, writing in 1910,
proposed 3 stages of curiosity.
a. 1st is child’s hunger to explore and probe its surroundings—it is instinctual rather than
intellectual.
b. 2nd, curiosity becomes more social, as children realize that other people are useful
sources of info about the world and begin asking an endless series of “why” questions; actual
questions aren’t important as the habit of gathering and assimilating info.
c. 3rd, curiosity is “transformed into interest in problems provoked by the observation of
things and the accumulation of material.
d. In this final stage, curiosity becomes a force that deepens the bond between the
individual and the world, adding layers of interest, complexity, and delight to her
experience
Chapter 6: The Power of Questions (91 - 102)
1.
In 1990 Dan Rothstein was working as a community organizer in Lawrence, an old mill
town in Massachusetts.
2.
While we’re all born with the capacity to ask questions, our ability to do so is unequally
distributed.
3.
AS WE’VE SEEN, USING LANGUAGE AS A TOOL TO SATISFY AND
4.
5.
EVEN IF WE WERE RAISED TO ASK QUESTIONS, WE CAN EASILY
IT’S FREQUENTLY OBSERVED THAT AS SMALL COMPANIES GROW
Chapter 7: The Importance of Knowing (103 - 124)
1.
(103 -105) IN 1999 SUGATA MITRA WAS TEACHING COMPUTER
2.
A SCHOOL IS A CRUCIBLE OF CURIOSITY. IT CAN IMBUE YOUNG
3.
1. CHILDREN DON’T NEED TEACHERS TO INSTRUCT THEM
4.
2. FACTS KILL CREATIVITY
5.
3. SCHOOLS SHOULD TEACH THINKING SKILLS INSTEAD OF
KNOWLEDGE
6.
THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTOR TO FUTURE
7.
IN HIS COMPELLING BOOK ON EDUCATION, HOW CHILDREN
8.
AS WE’VE SEEN, CHILDHOOD CURIOSITY IS A COLLABORATION
Part 3: Staying Curious
Chapter 8: Seven Ways to Stay Curious
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Stay Foolish
Build the Database
Forage like a Foxhog
Ask the Big Why
Be a Thinkerer
Question Your Teaspoons
Turn Puzzles into Mysteries