# Curious  ## Metadata - Author: [[Ian Leslie]] - Full Title: Curious - Category: #books ## Highlights - The true beauty of learning stuff, including apparently useless stuff, is that it takes us out of ourselves, reminds us that we are part of a far greater project, one that has been under way for at least as long as human beings have been talking to each other. ([Location 330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=330)) - diversive curiosity—the desire for novelty. ([Location 402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=402)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Epistemic curiosity represents the deepening of a simple seeking of newness into a directed attempt to build understanding. It’s what happens when diversive curiosity grows up. ([Location 491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=491)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The individuals more likely to survive would have been those adept at striking a balance between knowledge gathering and self-preservation. ([Location 522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=522)) - what’s really interesting is that the most consistent and universal predictor of preference in these studies is mystery: scenes that hint at something the viewer cannot see—a winding path leading off into the distance, or dense foliage with a hint of a gap through which one could pass. The reassuring presence of something we know is good for us gives us pleasure. But so does the promise of what lies beyond, the information we don’t yet know.† ([Location 536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=536)) - Perceptual curiosity, which diversive curiosity encompasses, refers specifically to the seeking out of physical experience—it is what drives people up mountains and down rivers, just to see what’s there. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=602)) - Appleton argues that people look for two things in a landscape: prospect and refuge. Prospect refers to the enjoyment we get from an overview of the scene. Refuge is the suggestion of safe places to hide, where one can see without being seen. You can think about this in terms of information preference—we like to gather information, and we enjoy having information advantages over others (sometimes we call them “secrets”). ([Location 618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=618)) ## New highlights added July 22, 2024 at 8:32 PM - Ever since Darwin, he said, we have had to come to terms with the fact that we share with our primate cousins the same three basic drives: food, sex, and shelter. But humans possess something else: a fourth drive. “Pure curiosity is unique to human beings. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=168)) - Rather than just getting more people to school and university, therefore, the new challenge is to find ways of making more people hungry to learn, question, and create. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=191)) - Need for cognition, or NFC, is a scientific measure of intellectual curiosity. ([Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=211)) - Tags: [[blue]] - digital technologies are severing the link between effort and mental exploration. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=255)) - a person’s curiosity is more state than trait. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=269)) - To stop it from happening, you need to understand what feeds curiosity and what starves it. ([Location 275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=275)) - This attraction to everything novel is what the scientists who study it call diversive curiosity. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=283)) - When diversive curiosity is entrained—when it is transformed into a quest for knowledge and understanding—it nourishes us. This deeper, more disciplined, and effortful type of curiosity is called epistemic curiosity, and it is the chief subject of this book.* ([Location 291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=291)) - The Internet ought to be giving epistemic curiosity another epochal boost, because it is making knowledge more widely available than ever before. But its amazing potential is undermined by our tendency to use it merely to stimulate diversive curiosity. ([Location 299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=299)) - A secondary subject of this book is empathic curiosity: curiosity about the thoughts and feelings of other people. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=301)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To teach someone to be an engineer or a lawyer or a programmer is not the same as teaching them to be a curious learner—yet the people who make the best engineers, lawyers, and programmers tend to be the most curious learners. ([Location 316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=316)) - their level of curiosity is acutely responsive to what’s around them—to their physical environment and, above all, to their adult caregivers. ([Location 647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=647)) - Your sense of identity, of being a person, is formed by the cultural knowledge you learn, first from your parents and then from others. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=680)) - The naughtiness of infants is experimental, a method of data collection. ([Location 692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=692)) - “In that moment of babbling, babies seem to be primed to take in more information,” he says. “It’s about creating a social interaction where now you can learn new things.” ([Location 730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=730)) - Babbling, like pointing, is a sign of readiness to learn, and babies are also more likely to use it as a tool of curiosity if their parents respond to it as such, ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=732)) - sometime around their third birthday, they start to ask how and why questions, questions designed to elicit explanations.* ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=764)) - Children are scientists, experimenting on their physical environment, but they are also investigative reporters, pumping their sources for secrets. ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=800)) - It’s not the worst thing you can do to a child. But after talking to the experts and learning about how children learn, I’m now painfully aware that every time I ignore my daughter’s questions, I may be stunting her innate desire to know. ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=812)) - Though smaller than the adult brain, the infant brain contains millions more neural connections. The wiring, however, is a mess; the lines of communication between infant neurons are far less efficient than between those in the adult brain. The baby’s perception of the world is consequently both intensely rich and wildly disordered. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=826)) - Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting—a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. ([Location 833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=833)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One theory, dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, conceives of curiosity as a biological drive, like the urge to satisfy hunger or sexual desire. But instead of being satisfied by food or sex, the curiosity drive is satiated only by information. ([Location 842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=842)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When I finish a large meal, I may have no wish to eat again for a long time. But when I read an article on a topic I’m fascinated by, I immediately want to read more. Not being satisfied is what makes curiosity so satisfying. ([Location 852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=852)) - Curiosity is at its highest when the violation of an expectation is more than tiny and less than enormous. ([Location 862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=862)) - According to Loewenstein, curiosity is a response to an information gap. We feel curious where there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know. ([Location 867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=867)) - Berlyne had put his finger on a paradoxical attribute of curiosity—it is stimulated by understanding and by the absence of understanding. ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=887)) - The crucial point here is that it’s not simply the absence of information that creates curiosity, but a gap in our existing information: ([Location 893](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=893)) - Children and adults who are dismissed as incurious may be suffering from a different problem—a lack of basic information about the subject at hand. ([Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=914)) - Unless you’re in the curiosity zone, it’s difficult to become interested in anything. ([Location 915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=915)) - The intensity of our curiosity is affected by whether we think the information that we’re missing is likely to provide insight. ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=925)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “ignorant but happy” effect—when people are confident that they have the answers, they become blithely incurious about alternatives. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=945)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it like this, “Our comforting conviction the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” ([Location 951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=951)) - Tags: [[blue]] - CURIOSITY HAS BEEN CALLED “THE KNOWLEDGE EMOTION.” An information gap isn’t simply recognized rationally; its onset is like an itch that we have to scratch. Information gaps cause us pain, but it’s a pain we invite in (in this sense, curiosity is fundamentally masochistic). ([Location 963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=963)) - “Insecure children are less likely to make physical and psychological expeditions to gather information.” Curiosity is underwritten by love. ([Location 991](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=991)) - Stories depend on the artful manipulation of what Loewenstein calls information gaps. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1003)) - In McKee’s words, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. ([Location 1003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1003)) - Alfred Hitchcock called his information gaps “McGuffins”—simple devices that moved his plots along. ([Location 1016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1016)) - skillful presenters will often start by posing a question to the people in the room that they answer fully only after exploring several alternatives; when the presenter finally arrives at the answer, her audience is then more likely to believe it’s the right one, because its members are experiencing the emotional satisfaction of closing an information gap. ([Location 1024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1024)) - Puzzles have definite answers. ([Location 1040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1040)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Puzzles are orderly; they have a beginning and an end. Once the missing information is found, it’s not a puzzle anymore. The frustration you felt when you were searching for the answer is replaced by satisfaction. ([Location 1042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1042)) - We have a tendency to prioritize puzzles over mysteries, because we know they can be solved. The question “Where is Osama bin Laden?” was a puzzle, and when it was solved there was great jubilation. “How best to combat Islamist terrorism?”—arguably a much more important question—is a mystery, ([Location 1054](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1054)) - at a certain point—Greenblatt connects it to the death of the playwright’s beloved son, Hamnet—Shakespeare started to take these older narrative structures and remove crucial planks from them, in a way that made it harder for his audience to understand why his characters acted the way they did. ([Location 1080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1080)) - productive frustration. ([Location 1130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1130)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The very reason we have technology is to make things easier. But making things easier can come at a cost—there can be hidden value in difficulty. ([Location 1153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1153)) - we learn better when we find learning difficult. ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1163)) - Robert Bjork coined the phrase “desirable difficulties” to describe the counterintuitive notion that we learn better when the learning is hard. ([Location 1182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1182)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We’re becoming so used to easy answers that we’re forgetting how to ask questions. The Guardian asked Singhal if his efforts to refine Google’s accuracy are being boosted as users learn how to enter search terms with greater precision. “Actually,” Singhal replied, with a weary sigh, “it works the other way. The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the questions become.” ([Location 1206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1206)) - In ancient Athens, curiosity, or curiositas, meant the pursuit of knowledge purely for its own sake. ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1252)) - In 1620 Sir Francis Bacon reassured his readers that Adam and Eve had sinned by seeking moral knowledge, rather than knowledge of nature, and that God regarded scientific investigation as an “innocent and kindly sport of children playing at hide-and-seek.” Rather than being a raid on a forbidden realm, the investigation of nature was reframed as a way of further revealing the glory of God’s creation, a sign of humanity’s superiority to the animals. ([Location 1299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1299)) - 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. ([Location 1345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1345)) - The major index of this rise in empathic curiosity was literature: fiction, drama, and poetry. ([Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1356)) - When readers picked up Pamela or David Copperfield, they were finding out something of what it felt like to be another person—to spend time inside the mind of someone from a different sex, age, culture, or class. In ([Location 1363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1363)) - Novels offer us a kind of mental simulation of real-life encounters, ([Location 1381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1381)) - people performed better on tests of social and emotional intelligence after reading fiction. Even more interestingly, this applied to literary fiction and not to plot-driven popular fiction. The reason, said the researchers, is that literary fiction leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make more effort in interpreting the motives of characters. ([Location 1383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1383)) - mysteries stimulate more of our curiosity than puzzles. ([Location 1386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1386)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the distinction between epistemic and diversive curiosity has remained remarkably consistent. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1399)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The problem today is rooted in an abundance, rather than a scarcity, of information and of ease rather than difficulty of access to it. We are in danger of losing our taste for intellectual exploration, ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1406)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added August 2, 2024 at 5:52 AM - These online intermediaries between us and the world’s information have their shortcomings and algorithmic biases. But the first thing to say about them is that they are indispensable, given the otherwise ungovernable amount of information now in circulation. ([Location 1448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1448)) - Tags: [[blue]] - despite this, we may be becoming a less curious society than eighteenth-century London. Curiosity is about the demand as well as the supply of information. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1455)) - These days, we tend to associate serendipity with luck and neglect what Horace Walpole called “sagacity.” ([Location 1468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1468)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Larry Page described the “perfect search engine” as one that would “understand exactly what I mean and give me back exactly what I want.” But what if I don’t know what I want? ([Location 1479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1479)) - Answering the question “What do I want to learn?” is much more difficult. It’s one of the most important questions of our lives, and the one question the Internet can’t help you with. ([Location 1485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1485)) - Good bookstores are still better than Amazon at attracting your attention to books you’ve never heard of before and didn’t set out to acquire (a recent study found that people are twice as likely to buy a book on impulse in a bookstore than online). ([Location 1508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1508)) - not only were consumers from all over the world biased toward music from their own country, but this bias had increased since the turn of the century. ([Location 1529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1529)) - It’s not that the Internet doesn’t have the potential to open our minds to new information, other people, and other worlds. It’s that, all too often, this potential lies untapped. In the future, the people who are better at exploiting it will find themselves at an increasing advantage. ([Location 1535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1535)) - the costs of higher education are rising at a greater rate than average incomes—but the cost of not being educated is rising even faster. ([Location 1560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1560)) - They found that demographic factors played little part in college success (factors such as social class play their biggest role in determining who gets to college in the first place). The best predictors of success were intelligence and performance in school. After that, nothing else counted for much, except for conscientiousness and NFC—need for cognition— ([Location 1596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1596)) - the spread of Internet access “mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.” Foremost among them is that not everyone is interested in exercising their epistemic curiosity. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1627)) - Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. —CLAY CHRISTENSEN, THE INNOVATOR’S DILEMMA ([Location 1700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1700)) - Question asking, he came to believe, is fundamental to being human. “You know, it’s almost a physical feeling, isn’t it?” he says. “When you walk away from an encounter and think, I wish I’d asked that.” ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1729)) - Mothers who asked more questions of their children had children who asked more questions of them. Question asking, it turned out, is contagious. ([Location 1750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1750)) - Working-class families are more likely to pursue what Lareau calls a natural growth style of parenting. While no less loving than middle-class parents, working-class parents spend less time, effort, and expense developing their children’s talents and involve them in fewer organized activities. ([Location 1800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1800)) - knowing what not to know was itself indispensable knowledge. ([Location 1891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1891)) - Linsey McGoey, a sociologist at the University of Essex, studies “strategic ignorance”—the circumstances in which cultivating ignorance becomes more advantageous than cultivating knowledge. ([Location 1892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1892)) - disarm. Michael Marquardt identifies four reasons that we don’t ask questions when we ought to. First, there is a desire to protect ourselves from the danger of looking stupid. ([Location 1909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1909)) - Good questions require time to germinate and grow. ([Location 1913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1913)) - Third, the culture discourages questioning. In authoritarian countries, questions that spring from genuine curiosity are discouraged. ([Location 1914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1914)) - The fourth reason we don’t ask questions, says Marquardt, is that we lack the skills required to ask them. Asking good questions stimulates the hunger to know more by opening up exciting new known unknowns. ([Location 1918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=1918)) - CHILDHOOD CURIOSITY IS A COLLABORATION between child and adult. The surest way to kill it is to leave it alone. Epistemic curiosity is not a “natural” state of mind requiring only the removal of obstacles to flourish, but a joint project that needs to be worked at. ([Location 2339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2339)) - Whoever you are and whatever start you get in life, knowing stuff makes the world more abundant with possibility and gleams of light more likely to illuminate the darkness. It opens the universe a little. ([Location 2360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2360)) - Success isn’t good for curiosity. ([Location 2510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2510)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Curiosity about life in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” ([Location 2558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2558)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rest of Young’s steps depend and elaborate on his first. The second step is “the working over.” This involves taking the facts you have gathered and looking at them again from different angles, bringing them into unusual combinations with other facts, ([Location 2569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2569)) - WE ALL KNOW ABOUT EUREKA MOMENTS, WHEN IDEAS SEEM TO drop unbidden into their creator’s head. In fact, as Young knew, there is little accidental about such insights. They arise from the gathering and the working over—the slow, deliberate, patient accumulation of knowledge. ([Location 2583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2583)) - She describes herself as “a curious octopus. I am always reaching out and taking in things from everywhere.” ([Location 2630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2630)) - “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” ([Location 2656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2656)) - The foxhog possesses what IBM calls “T-shaped knowledge.” The most valuable twenty-first-century workers combine deep skills in a specialty (the vertical axis of the T), with a broad understanding of other disciplines (the horizontal axis). ([Location 2679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2679)) - Psychologist Philip Tetlock has called this effect “the taboo tradeoff.” When parties in a negotiation are asked to trade something they consider sacred for something secular or material, they become angry, inflexible, and deaf to cost-benefit reasoning. ([Location 2785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2785)) - Making progress on such issues can certainly help, but it can also throw into even sharper relief conflicts of values—values rooted in fierce, heartfelt beliefs about identity and moral purpose. If answers are to found, they lie buried deep in the “why” of the dispute rather than the “what.” Only negotiators curious enough about the other side’s fundamental beliefs and feelings will discover them. ([Location 2799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2799)) - 5. BE A THINKERER ([Location 2855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2855)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Franklin. He couldn’t forget about anything he couldn’t explain. As one of his biographers puts it, Franklin “could not drink a cup of tea without wondering why tea leaves gathered in one configuration rather than another at the bottom.” ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2875)) - A PORTMANTEAU OF “THINK” AND “TINKER,” THE ORIGIN OF THE verb “to thinker” is unknown. ([Location 2891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2891)) - David Hume saw that an economy needs a balance of thinkers and doers and that each is improved by the other: “The same age, which produces great philosophers and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters. We cannot reasonably expect, that a piece of woolen-cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation, which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected.” ([Location 2922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2922)) - John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 per cent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “Here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. ([Location 2928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=2928)) - Henry James used curiosity to turn the ordinary stuff of life into great art. But then he was a genius. The rest of us can, at the very least, use it to make our lives more interesting. ([Location 3111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=3111)) - When you live somewhere boring—and we all live somewhere boring—then we have a choice about the way we will see that place. We can spend our days thinking like everyone else, seeing the same things over and over, and never once wondering about how they got that way, or why they stayed that way, or how they could be better. Or, we can learn. And if we make the choice to learn, and to be curious about the things around us, then we are essentially making the choice never to be bored again. ([Location 3114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=3114)) - Puzzles are stepping-stones to mysteries. The more mysteries we pursue, the more knowledge we gather, the greater our intellectual and cultural range. ([Location 3167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=3167)) - empathic curiosity depends on epistemic curiosity; ([Location 3260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=3260)) - Curiosity is a life force. If depression involves a turning inward, a feeling that there’s nothing in the world that is worthy of our attention (or that nothing we pay attention to is worthy), then it is curiosity that takes us the other way, that reminds us that the world is an inexhaustibly diverting, inspiring, fascinating place. ([Location 3282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=3282)) - Epistemic curiosity can be tough to justify in the moment. It is hard work, it diverts us from our tasks and goals, and we never quite know where it will take us. But we have a choice. We can decide to explore the worlds of knowledge that present themselves to us. Or, like Bjarni, we can turn our face from the beauty and the mystery and make for the next appointment. Will you take advantage of your sublimely lucky break? ([Location 3303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JZBA9N8&location=3303))