For me, one answer is: because I’m not asking questions. I blunder through conversations trying to “do my job”, or to look good, or elaborating my own theories, or allowing cached replies to come out of my mouth on autopilot. I blunder through readings, scanning my eyes over the words and letting thoughts strike me as they may. Rarely am I pulled by a specific desire to know.
And most of my learning happens at those rare times.
How about you? When you read, how often do you chasesomething? When you chat with your friends -- are you curious about how they’re doing, why their mouth twitched as they said that, or why exactly they disagree with you about X? When you sit down to write, or to do research -- are you asking yourself specific questions, and then answering them?
Are there certain situations in which you get most of your useful ideas -- situations you could put yourself in more often?
Lately, when I notice that I’m not curious about anything, I’ve been trying to interrupt whatever I’m doing. If I’m in a conversation, and neither I nor my interlocutor is trying to figure something out, I call a mini “halt, melt, and catch fire” (inside my head, at least), and ask myself what I want. Surely not stale conversations. If I’m writing, and I don’t like the sentence I just wrote -- instead of reshuffling the words in the hopes that the new version will just happen to be better, I ask myself what I don’t like about it.
Thus, for the past six months, several times a day, I've interrupted my thoughts and put them back on an “ask questions” track. (“Grrr, he said my argument was dishonest... Wait, is he right? What should it look like if he is?”; “I notice I feel hopeless about this paper writing. Maybe there’s something I should do differently?”) It's helping. I'm building the habit of interrupting myself when I'm "thinking" without trying to find something out, or taking actions that I expect won't accomplish anything. As a human, I’m probably stuck running on habits -- but I can at least change *which* habits I run on.
When are you in the habit of asking questions? Would you learn more if you habitually asked other questions, too? Which ones?
I just asked someone for constructive criticism and was told my article lacks a point.
Here’s the point I had in mind:
Consider training your brain to scream “Error! Look for a different way to do this” whenever you’re having a conversation, writing an essay, reading a book, cooking a meal, or mentally rehearsing your views about (the Singularity / why so-and-so’s wrong / whatever)... without being curious about something.
For me, gaining this habit even partially has boosted my learning and my productivity -- maybe more than any other rationality learning I’ve managed in the last year.
“Make sure you’re actually aiming for something” is one of those pieces of rationality advice that’s so obvious, one might think it doesn’t need stating. But for me, at least, implementing this wasn’t automatic at all. So, if you’re like me, consider practicing this habit. It might make your life a lot better.
I don't think that framing this specifically in terms of curiosity is a good idea, as distinct from just detecting useless activity (i.e. lost purposes). Same thing as what JGWeissman said.
For example, when applied to my revisiting of basics of mathematics/logic over the last year or so, it could well give a false positive, since I wasn't particularly curious about any tool/idea I was learning, and I was not trying to solve any particular problem that better knowledge of math would help me with. The goal was simply to obtain better skills, so that thinking about decision theory can become more clear/fruitful, in whatever ways.
2Jonathan_Graehl
I (also?) disagree with the criticism. Your article immediately made sense to me. It's a valuable reminder (increase the frequency with which you think and act purposefully), and a suggestion for a valuable habit that can serve to do so.
Related to: Rationalization, Meditation on curiosity, Original Seeing.
Why aren’t you learning faster?
For me, one answer is: because I’m not asking questions. I blunder through conversations trying to “do my job”, or to look good, or elaborating my own theories, or allowing cached replies to come out of my mouth on autopilot. I blunder through readings, scanning my eyes over the words and letting thoughts strike me as they may. Rarely am I pulled by a specific desire to know.
And most of my learning happens at those rare times.
How about you? When you read, how often do you chase something? When you chat with your friends -- are you curious about how they’re doing, why their mouth twitched as they said that, or why exactly they disagree with you about X? When you sit down to write, or to do research -- are you asking yourself specific questions, and then answering them?
Are there certain situations in which you get most of your useful ideas -- situations you could put yourself in more often?
Lately, when I notice that I’m not curious about anything, I’ve been trying to interrupt whatever I’m doing. If I’m in a conversation, and neither I nor my interlocutor is trying to figure something out, I call a mini “halt, melt, and catch fire” (inside my head, at least), and ask myself what I want. Surely not stale conversations. If I’m writing, and I don’t like the sentence I just wrote -- instead of reshuffling the words in the hopes that the new version will just happen to be better, I ask myself what I don’t like about it.
Thus, for the past six months, several times a day, I've interrupted my thoughts and put them back on an “ask questions” track. (“Grrr, he said my argument was dishonest... Wait, is he right? What should it look like if he is?”; “I notice I feel hopeless about this paper writing. Maybe there’s something I should do differently?”) It's helping. I'm building the habit of interrupting myself when I'm "thinking" without trying to find something out, or taking actions that I expect won't accomplish anything. As a human, I’m probably stuck running on habits -- but I can at least change *which* habits I run on.