A Curious Lack of Curiosity
Four and five year olds famously often ask many concrete questions about the world around them. Like “What’s inside a snake?” They also tend to have at least a rough idea how they might try to answer such questions for themselves, if they had to, instead of asking adults. Like cut the snake open.
However, if I, as a professor, ask high school or college students, “What are questions where you want to know the answer?”, I usually get answers like “law” or “chemistry”, large topic categories instead of more specific answerable questions. They still don’t know what is inside a snake, but are no longer interested in that.
If I ask them how they might try to answer a more specific question for themselves, instead of looking it up, they have few ideas. They plan to learn stuff mostly by taking more classes, or by watching random Youtube videos, or maybe today asking a LLM.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve slowly realized just how much I don’t know, and I have accumulated more questions where I’d like to know the answers. And I’ve collected more ways to inquire myself, instead of looking stuff up. Furthermore, I actually organize my life around trying to find important neglected questions, and trying to help answer them.
Yes, I’m weird. But even for me, it has taken most of my life to reach a state where my stance toward abstract questions is somewhat like that of a five year old toward their concrete questions. Somehow we lose our curiosity, and have to fight to get it back.
Oftentimes as adults our pride gets in the way of asking the "stupid" questions. One of the things I like about LLMs is that you can ask them stupid questions all day and they will never judge you for it.
The phenomenon is broader than just questions. Middle-aged people rarely pick up new hobbies for example, because they don't like to be seen as beginners.
One of the nice changes of later adulthood is that we often become less concerned about other peoples' impressions of us. That becomes very freeing and it puts some of those stupid questions and new hobbies back on the table.
This is a great point, but my kids are not that much older than 4 and 5, and my first-hand experience with them shows me that we should not overly romanticize "child-like curiosity." Yes, kids ask lots of questions, but as soon as they realize what it would take to answer them on their own, they move on to something else.