Can the practice of curiosity be inspired or incentivized?
Now, I'm using words like incentivize and inspire because we humans, we choose to do things for different reasons. Sometimes we are inspired and we just get on that bandwagon and we go. And other times we need an incentive, especially if we're talking about exercise. Not everybody is rearing to go to the gym or to go out and jog or whatever. Somebody can tell us how wonderful it'll make us feel and how we'll lose weight and all of these other benefits
Arya Sunyata
@theheartdrive · 5:00
I absolutely agree with you that curiosity could actually cure a lot of the ways that social media has changed society. People have polarized into taking things extremely personally but it's not old to make an us against them mentality. What's new about the US and them mentality is the way that this manifests so quickly over simple opinions. Before social media I feel like dialogue was a little more possible because you needed physical interactions and other channels of communication that coexisted along with the verbal
Binati Sheth
@Binati_Sheth · 5:00
And that has led to, I would say, some problems. Right. To put it mildly. Also, that has led to a lot of, I would say, shuttering of gates. Because if I share my curiosity with XYZ, who is a colleague from another university, chances are they might beat me to it on the research. Right. Yes, competition is good and it motivates people, et cetera, et cetera
It's frustrating when you see, like, if there was a pendulum representing the fear within society or excessive individualism like that pendulum, these things and to know the inevitable place of chaos that these things are heading or at least be able to see anticipate and not being able to do anything. It's like you have to wait until it all comes crumbling down before change can happen. And I hate that answer because I really think that we humans are capable of more
Dewuan .
@FryedOreo · 4:55
And then there are others that feel, well, you're not talking about the things that I value, so I'm not going to engage, et cetera, et cetera. But I think consistency overall will get people on board eventually. So in terms of society and culture, I don't know if every I mean, we all are as humans, curious creatures, right? We all have some element of wonder to us, but to what effect and what scale can we evaluate that?
This is good. I was just telling Arya that when I when I see all of the issues within society then my tendency is to try to lean into thought experiments of how can we solve this or that. But when I do that, then sometimes I lose the complexity and nuance. Because as you're talking about not only curiosity but the incentivization of these things, they're all slippery slopes
I'm hearing in my head, build it and they will come. Is that the Field of Dreams movie? I don't even know if I ever watch that movie, but I heard people say that phrase all the time. You know what? You're absolutely right. Arya mentioned the facet of fear. And I think that, like, as you're describing the knowing aspect of it or the certainty of it, I think that's also tied into fear. There's a lot of unknowns
Arya Sunyata
@theheartdrive · 5:00
But even within the scientific community scientists who make fantastic breakthroughs are inevitably overtaken by corporate interest and product is put to market, drugs are developed, scientific breakthroughs are then monetized in a way that serve the same d*** freaking pattern. This is the problem. Everything becomes weaponized in a way. The entire financial landscape is built a certain way and it's not going to be changing anytime soon in paradigm. Why?
It's got this stranglehold and there's no avoiding it, at least not at this point within the ages of the human existence. I guess I optimistically keep wanting there to be some way to they always talk about too, change, that it takes a drop upon drop upon drop to create a wave where change can come. And yet I suppose it's really about the level of zoom. You mentioned the pockets and it's that kind of thing. It can't necessarily happen at a societal level
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Arya Sunyata
@theheartdrive · 5:00
Instead of making the products services, instead of making the products other things, the user is the product. So they have to bombard the user with adverts. They have to change their mechanisms of behavior. They have to do all these things because when it met Wall Street, the user is the product
Arya Sunyata
@theheartdrive · 5:00
I think every child that's naturally curious then either gets it conditioned out of them or conditioned to be reinforced. Because there are plenty of people that are not particularly curious. They are fed an answer and they're given this conditioning and they are fine with it. This is because and I see these arguments, people are giving me fictions as if they were facts, right? Like God said XYZ thing and I'm like God said to who? In what context?
J.L. Beasley
@Her_Sisu · 2:36
The thing is knowledge, just overall knowledge that it would tend to creep towards that you would have the people who just have that innate humble curiosity, I believe that they would maintain that and just be like, oh, great. And I get a tax break or I don't have to pay extra money for something, right? Oh, this is a perk because I like learning anyway and I like getting to know about other things anyway
I suppose this is sort of a curiosity meta moment of listening to your thoughts and reflecting on them, asking a lot of questions then about what is it I'm doing and why am I doing it? And then the scope of it? And why do I feel that that massive scope is important versus something different and what would be more effective, what would fulfill whatever it is I need as well as any of these other sorts of larger questions or things that I'm pondering? Yes, I'm processing
Almost definitely. JL I think I was sort of thinking along the lines of sort of fake it till you make it so, like, incentivize it until it becomes something people enjoy or are naturally inclined toward. But I think that was a bit too optimistic of a thing to think about. And I wasn't thinking about this as enforced upon everyone sort of thing, but more like when Facebook and Twitter and all of those things sort of slipped into the culture and how they had an effect