Sure thing - looks like I misunderstood your reply to my first comment... But I think you have also misunderstood my intent. let me try to explain.
For example, before making a correction to someone's comment (by default, an aggressive status move), ask yourself whether you will be communicating new information to the person -- something relevant to the discussion that they genuinely didn't know
I think this may be where you misunderstood me.
I wasn't trying to add to your ongoing discussion (which looks like it's something about genetic fitness as it relates to curiosity).
In fact I was merely skimming the comments and happened to notice your first claim about curiosity being only in humans. I happened to be intrigued by that claim and asked if you had more information about the subject (and gave a counter-example).
I wasn't interested in what came before that comment of yours - which is why I said above that I couldn't care less about the argument you were making...
I also wasn't reading other people's comments, or your replies to the other comments - I in fact had no idea that you had already replied to some other person's comment that should have somehow made it all clear. I happened to be reading your replies to my comments only (which you do when you get the little orange mail-icon).
When you make comments - please be aware that not everybody is actually following the full discussion.
Therefore I think you have assumed a negative overtone that really wasn't intended... ever in my comments. I really was just interested in hearing if you had any research on curiosity in other species.
Sure thing - I can absolutely see your point about proportions of species that are curious... now that you've made it clear to me in a thread that I'm actually following.
Instead, it's more like you "caught" me making a "mistake" in the "debate game"
hmmm - I don't play the debate game so well. You're quite right that I seized upon what I saw as a mistake of yours... but again, you assume my intent.
Can you tell me, from speaking to me, how much of the sequences I have read? Is it a little? is it a lot? am I a brand new newcomer to the site? Or have I been secretly lurking here for years without posting until recently? I can tell you that I'm not very good at guessing that kind of thing... and clearly, here I made a mistake.
I thought I'd spotted you making a "rookie mistake" and corrected it... assuming (incorrectly as it turns out) that maybe you didn't know and that it therefore might have a bearing on the rest of what you were trying to say. Go back and check my language and this time assume a charitable intent... and you'll see that I was not trying to tear you down... but just to explain something that I happened to know...
My apologies for that - clearly I messed up, but I can say that I was genuinely trying to correct an error... not trying to score a point in an argument that I wasn't even following.
you still should have interpreted it
In my experience, it's a very bad idea to assume how people should interpret things.
You have misinterpreted me just as much as I think I've misinterpreted you here... that is why I'm trying to explain my thinking to you now to explain why I came to the interpretation that I did.
before making a correction to someone's comment (by default, an aggressive status move), ask yourself whether you will be communicating new information to the person -- something relevant to the discussion that they genuinely didn't know.
I'd like to point out that this site is about learning from mistakes... I'd go so far as to say that correcting errors in people's comments is a good part of the raison detre of this site... (if not of it's sister site OB)
I clearly made a mistake about what you were trying to claim... that led me to think you must have made a mistake about how the logic worked.
I apologise again for my own misinterpretations
However, you have also misinterpreted my own intentions in a very uncharitable fashion.
I may well have completely misunderstood that you were making a different point to that which I had at first thought... but I am not making a mistake when I say that on this site - we are allowed to point out errors, and we aren't going to get very far if pointing them out is considered an act of aggression... rather than an act of help.
So lets talk about aggressive:
This kind of nitpicking is a form of logical rudeness
According to the page you linked-to I was not being logically rude. That page seems to imply that a logically rude person is deliberately trying to derail or win an argument by throwing curveballs or moving the goalposts. As I was not doing either of those things, I think I can say that I was not being logically rude.
I am sorry that your argument became derailed and that what I said may have helped in that... but I really was actually interested in the side-point... not just bringing it up to derail your argument.
If anyone actually has anything interesting to say against this argument, let them say it. Otherwise, let's not bother.
I have to say I was actually quite upset that you were so dismissive of what I was trying to say. I find that quite aggressive.
as well as the principle of sticking-to-the-point-of-the-discussion-and-not-derailing-the-flow-of-discourse-with-an-attempt-to-gain-status-points-by-showing-off-your-knowledge-of-how-to-form-the-logical-negation-of-a-statement
I find this quite an aggressive claim. As you are now aware - I was not trying to be rude, I was not trying to point-score, I was not even disagreeing with you... as I was not actually involved in your argument.
Can you please retract these rather aggressive claims of yours?
In principle, I agree with the notion that it is unforgivable to not want to know, and not want to improve your map to match the territory. However, even the most curious person in the world cannot maintain equal curiosity about all things, and even if they could there are limits on time and energy. In general, the things that inspire curiosity are determined by your personal likes, dislikes, and biases, and it is therefore worth considering carefully where these demarcations fall so as not to deprive ourselves of useful information. This is particularly important when it comes to things that inspire not just lack of interest, but aversion, or "anti-curiosity."
However, not all information is useful, and it can be useful to encourage a bias that cuts you off from information that is not particularly useful to you, so as to better allocate your time and energy. It is possible that it could also be useful to fabricate an "I don't want to know" stance about a certain type of information so as to better allocate your time, (for example, ceasing to watch television, and denying curiosity about what is happening on your favorite shows), but I will not discuss or advocate that here, largely because it's all I can do to hold the line against new time wasters.
The difficulty and danger of this method is that it is best accomplished by not thinking about the things you don't want to be curious about, and that can lead to not even realizing you aren't curious about them, so important things may slip through the cracks. For example, I have never smoked a cigarette, and it requires no effort on my part to not be curious about what it is like. That is such a deeply buried aversion that I might never have consciously noticed that lack of curiosity if I had not been writing this article. In this case, lack of curiosity about smoking is beneficial, but it could just as easily have been something that would be useful for me to be curious about, and I might never have noticed.
Analyzing your own areas of anti-curiosity is extremely difficult, both because your brain rebels at thinking about things it habitually doesn't think about, and because you will likely find a lack of rhyme or reason in which things you are anticurious about. Questioning things deeply held enough that you don't think about them is always deeply uncomfortable.
Many such anti-curiosity regions are more a matter of personal preference than anything else. One of mine falls in the area of video games: I've never played them much, and I deliberately cultivate a lack of curiosity about them because I don't believe the enjoyment or value they might give me would outweigh the amount of my precious time they would likely take up if I started. However, I spend more time than perhaps I should reading fanfiction. There are probably people reading this who are just the opposite, and there probably isn't any real difference between the two positions.
There are also many such regions that result from not having much knowledge or skill in an area, and, rather than rectifying the knowledge gap, developing a sense of superiority or disdain in relation to the area. One fairly common topic for this to occur around (at least for women) is the application of makeup. It is one I had to overcome myself. I didn't know how to put on makeup well as a teenager, and hadn't really tried, and looked down on the sorts of girls who came to class after an obvious half-hour beauty regimen. There were all sorts of plausible excuses for my disdain (women shouldn't make themselves into Barbies, intellect is more important, etc. ), but the real root reason was that I couldn't do it myself. It took time to overcome that enough to realize the real benefits to having that knowledge (even if I still don't bother on a daily basis), but there *are* real benefits to having that knowledge. At the very least, makeup is an expected part of formal or business attire for women in the US, and there are tangible benefits to following such social conventions regardless of how logical they are.
It is more difficult to overcome such an issue if it is rooted in lack of ability rather than lack of knowledge. I have long recognized intellectually the value of recognizing and responding appropriately to social cues, but it doesn't come easily to me, and my frustration often manifests itself in a feeling that I don't want to know. Recognizing that and overcoming it is an ongoing process.
Maintaining a balance on such things is difficult. I know that in areas in which I am comfortable, I excel at optimization, but if I am uncomfortable I subscribe strongly to the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy. Both approaches have their merits and their place, the challenge is maintaining awareness of which I am using and why I am using it so that I don't fall into a trap of willful ignorance.
Even when you have identified an area in which you should reverse course and cultivate curiosity, the battle is not over. You still have to overcome the hurdle of learning about the subject. However, I am not qualified to write an article on overcoming procrastination because I am not nearly successful enough at avoiding it.