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.
To romanticize child-like curiosity is to say or imply that we adults have lost something fundamental, how sad it is that we can't think of questions we want to answer for ourselves. The reason we lost that ability in the first place is that, as children, we were curious, but then we soon realized that we weren't going to be able to answer most of those questions ourselves. And most adults are not going to be able to teach children how to answer most of their questions, because most of their questions are either very very hard to answer or are just confused, even nonsensical. Such questions are cute in children, and I love them. But most adults stop asking such questions, not because they've become sad and hopeless, but simply because they've found whatever it is they do want to know about, and they've found a more or less reliable way to get the answers they want to know.
That said, it is of course great that there are weird people who are not only curious, but willing to *work hard enough* to find the answer. It's not the curiosity that makes you weird. It's the courage and self-discipline it takes to follow through on your curiosity that makes you different from most people. Children are absolutely not born with that, and most adults do not have it either.
To be honest, I think our culture heaps up a lot of unreasonable responsibilities on parents. I don't think having a Socratic dialog with your children should be part of the necessary requirements for being a good parent. Obviously, if you're inclined to cultivate your child's intellect, you should do so, because that is both quality time between you and your child and a benefit to your child's long term success. But I don't look down on any parent who just does what they have to do to put food on the table and tuck their children in at night. Heaping up extra expectations on parents is one reason I think we have fewer children.
But as for courage and discipline, that is something that can and must be taught directly by every parent, both by words and actions. Everyone must have some level of courage and discipline just to make it through the day, though of course levels vary wildly. When it comes to intellectual pursuits, there's really a delicate balancing act that has to take place. You want to encourage your children to really pursue the answers they're looking for, but you also don't want to make their child-like interest in something fascinating into a chore. Honestly, I think most of it is up to the child. They'll either choose to be courageous and disciplined in their pursuits, and that will become a pattern that shapes their whole life, or ... they'll be like most people, and just kind of get along.
Why kids lose their curiosity. It isn’t that education beats it out of them. A side effect of social learning is that children become increasingly attuned to what the dominant culture says about what types of knowledge seeking will be rewarded. Children, teens and adults orient themselves to acquiring knowledge that will allow them to build friendship and status networks, not questions that merely allow open-ended domain exploration.
The reason that most people's intersts are music, sports and entertainment is that these are venues for building relationships and social signalling. Asking specific questions for the intrinsic pleasure of knowledge acquisition is the province of scientists, scholars and persons on the autism spectrum.
This! Even at age 5, kids start to learn what kinds of questions and behaviors are "weird" and lower their status to peers. Watching that play out is fascinating and tragic as a parent. I've always attempted to encourage and never shame or even question any questions or fantastical explanations of anything that come from my son's mouth because I love that he's using his brain that way. But it's only a matter of time before he rolls it all up like the rest of us learn to...
I remember with fondness having a conversation with my two sons, who were maybe 6 and 4 years old, about the fact that one day they would be grownups, and they would have their own homes and of course jobs. My four year old suddenly burst out crying, “but we don’t even know how to drive a car!”
I quickly explained that of course I would teach them how to drive when they were older.
Fast forward to 2022, my youngest son has now graduated from college (he’s a mechanical engineer) but still doesn’t have his drivers license. Later that year he finally gets moving on his first job and accepts an employment offer to work in another state starting early the next year.
As for teaching him to drive, this proved to be more of a challenge than becoming a college graduate. My son had been in a terrible car accident (as a passenger). His friend was T-boned by a 17 year old new driver. My son was seated in the backseat (driver’s side), which was the side that got hit.
No one was seriously injured (my son was bruised by his seatbelt), but my son was nervous to get behind the wheel of a car. Little by little his fear receded and he started driving under my instruction.
A week before moving to his new home, he was finally ready to take his road test and passed on his first attempt (his older brother took 5 attempts).
I think I was more proud of my son for overcoming his fear of driving than I was about his graduation from college. The everyday things we take for granted are often more difficult than we think.
I think I'm slightly less weird than you, so maybe my example is more representative. Generally, I feel like I have a good enough model of the world, which can be straightforwardly expanded (to an extent) whenever a particular need arises. Snakes have meat and blood and bones inside of them, like most other skin-having creatures, but beyond that they don't seem particularly interesting.
To a child who doesn't know even that much, improving his world-model is pretty valuable for low opportunity cost, whereas to me learning the finer points of herpetology for its own sake doesn't seem worth it.
Re: getting back (or growing) one's curiosity. One route for this happening occurs when a person has sufficient expertise (which can mean decades of practice) in question answering and domain exploration to know how to ask a specific question in a new domain. This is why Robin got better at question asking as his exploration expertise grew. When you are an expert in one domain, that can also transfer your exploration skills to adjacent domains. If you are expert in multiple different domains, you can transfer to domains in between those.
I've studied curiosity and knowledge seeking. Immense individual variation exists. There are personality variables that overlap with cognitive styles. The terms that are used in studies of this variation include need for cognition, analytical processing style; reflective vs. intuitive processing style; openness to experience; actively open-minded thinking. These are conceived of as enduring traits, but going in to a scientific field will also increase your analytical processing tendencies.
It's not complicated: our K-12 school/prison complex *punishes* kids for curiosity. College generally rewards it, but it's too late by then, the fire has gone out.
Just today, I found out from the excellent Substacker Tomas Pueyo why Moscow is "weird" and is located in the specific spot it is for geographic and historical reasons. What will I do with this knowledge? Who knows, but I love that I have it! I started to then think about why the city I live in is where it is. And I even asked an LLM to help me think through that in a way that was enriching and would have been very difficult from traditional research methods: so AI isn't all bad!
The key to a 5-year-old's curiosity (and I can speak as the parent of one) is that they don't think as much about the immediate utility of any of their questions.
College students (unfortunately) have been trained to think about knowledge as instrumental and vocational on their way to adulthood, where learning about anything that can't make you money or otherwise "optimize" you life is widely viewed as a waste of time and maybe even completely irresponsible to entertain. So, those are the social incentives we respond to. Especially Americans who live extremely busy lives where they (literally) are told to "earn a living" (think about the sinister implications of that throwaway phrase for a moment...).
I wish it weren't so. It certainly needn't be! We have plenty of money in Western societies. You'd think, with all our material excess, we'd be living like ancient Athenian citizens dedicating our excess leisure time to the great thoughts and stimulating conversation. But instead we "hustle" all day and then veg out all night.
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.
To romanticize child-like curiosity is to say or imply that we adults have lost something fundamental, how sad it is that we can't think of questions we want to answer for ourselves. The reason we lost that ability in the first place is that, as children, we were curious, but then we soon realized that we weren't going to be able to answer most of those questions ourselves. And most adults are not going to be able to teach children how to answer most of their questions, because most of their questions are either very very hard to answer or are just confused, even nonsensical. Such questions are cute in children, and I love them. But most adults stop asking such questions, not because they've become sad and hopeless, but simply because they've found whatever it is they do want to know about, and they've found a more or less reliable way to get the answers they want to know.
That said, it is of course great that there are weird people who are not only curious, but willing to *work hard enough* to find the answer. It's not the curiosity that makes you weird. It's the courage and self-discipline it takes to follow through on your curiosity that makes you different from most people. Children are absolutely not born with that, and most adults do not have it either.
To be honest, I think our culture heaps up a lot of unreasonable responsibilities on parents. I don't think having a Socratic dialog with your children should be part of the necessary requirements for being a good parent. Obviously, if you're inclined to cultivate your child's intellect, you should do so, because that is both quality time between you and your child and a benefit to your child's long term success. But I don't look down on any parent who just does what they have to do to put food on the table and tuck their children in at night. Heaping up extra expectations on parents is one reason I think we have fewer children.
But as for courage and discipline, that is something that can and must be taught directly by every parent, both by words and actions. Everyone must have some level of courage and discipline just to make it through the day, though of course levels vary wildly. When it comes to intellectual pursuits, there's really a delicate balancing act that has to take place. You want to encourage your children to really pursue the answers they're looking for, but you also don't want to make their child-like interest in something fascinating into a chore. Honestly, I think most of it is up to the child. They'll either choose to be courageous and disciplined in their pursuits, and that will become a pattern that shapes their whole life, or ... they'll be like most people, and just kind of get along.
Why kids lose their curiosity. It isn’t that education beats it out of them. A side effect of social learning is that children become increasingly attuned to what the dominant culture says about what types of knowledge seeking will be rewarded. Children, teens and adults orient themselves to acquiring knowledge that will allow them to build friendship and status networks, not questions that merely allow open-ended domain exploration.
The reason that most people's intersts are music, sports and entertainment is that these are venues for building relationships and social signalling. Asking specific questions for the intrinsic pleasure of knowledge acquisition is the province of scientists, scholars and persons on the autism spectrum.
This! Even at age 5, kids start to learn what kinds of questions and behaviors are "weird" and lower their status to peers. Watching that play out is fascinating and tragic as a parent. I've always attempted to encourage and never shame or even question any questions or fantastical explanations of anything that come from my son's mouth because I love that he's using his brain that way. But it's only a matter of time before he rolls it all up like the rest of us learn to...
parents have a lot of power when it comes to children's interests, hobbies, goals, future occupations
I remember with fondness having a conversation with my two sons, who were maybe 6 and 4 years old, about the fact that one day they would be grownups, and they would have their own homes and of course jobs. My four year old suddenly burst out crying, “but we don’t even know how to drive a car!”
I quickly explained that of course I would teach them how to drive when they were older.
Fast forward to 2022, my youngest son has now graduated from college (he’s a mechanical engineer) but still doesn’t have his drivers license. Later that year he finally gets moving on his first job and accepts an employment offer to work in another state starting early the next year.
As for teaching him to drive, this proved to be more of a challenge than becoming a college graduate. My son had been in a terrible car accident (as a passenger). His friend was T-boned by a 17 year old new driver. My son was seated in the backseat (driver’s side), which was the side that got hit.
No one was seriously injured (my son was bruised by his seatbelt), but my son was nervous to get behind the wheel of a car. Little by little his fear receded and he started driving under my instruction.
A week before moving to his new home, he was finally ready to take his road test and passed on his first attempt (his older brother took 5 attempts).
I think I was more proud of my son for overcoming his fear of driving than I was about his graduation from college. The everyday things we take for granted are often more difficult than we think.
I think I'm slightly less weird than you, so maybe my example is more representative. Generally, I feel like I have a good enough model of the world, which can be straightforwardly expanded (to an extent) whenever a particular need arises. Snakes have meat and blood and bones inside of them, like most other skin-having creatures, but beyond that they don't seem particularly interesting.
To a child who doesn't know even that much, improving his world-model is pretty valuable for low opportunity cost, whereas to me learning the finer points of herpetology for its own sake doesn't seem worth it.
Re: getting back (or growing) one's curiosity. One route for this happening occurs when a person has sufficient expertise (which can mean decades of practice) in question answering and domain exploration to know how to ask a specific question in a new domain. This is why Robin got better at question asking as his exploration expertise grew. When you are an expert in one domain, that can also transfer your exploration skills to adjacent domains. If you are expert in multiple different domains, you can transfer to domains in between those.
I've studied curiosity and knowledge seeking. Immense individual variation exists. There are personality variables that overlap with cognitive styles. The terms that are used in studies of this variation include need for cognition, analytical processing style; reflective vs. intuitive processing style; openness to experience; actively open-minded thinking. These are conceived of as enduring traits, but going in to a scientific field will also increase your analytical processing tendencies.
I wonder how much of the lack of curiosity is just growing up, and how much is the result of our education system. (And how we could test that.)
Want to post your list of unanswered questions? Maybe some readers can help.
Even if not, I suspect the list itself is interesting.
Seconded
It's not complicated: our K-12 school/prison complex *punishes* kids for curiosity. College generally rewards it, but it's too late by then, the fire has gone out.
Just today, I found out from the excellent Substacker Tomas Pueyo why Moscow is "weird" and is located in the specific spot it is for geographic and historical reasons. What will I do with this knowledge? Who knows, but I love that I have it! I started to then think about why the city I live in is where it is. And I even asked an LLM to help me think through that in a way that was enriching and would have been very difficult from traditional research methods: so AI isn't all bad!
The key to a 5-year-old's curiosity (and I can speak as the parent of one) is that they don't think as much about the immediate utility of any of their questions.
College students (unfortunately) have been trained to think about knowledge as instrumental and vocational on their way to adulthood, where learning about anything that can't make you money or otherwise "optimize" you life is widely viewed as a waste of time and maybe even completely irresponsible to entertain. So, those are the social incentives we respond to. Especially Americans who live extremely busy lives where they (literally) are told to "earn a living" (think about the sinister implications of that throwaway phrase for a moment...).
I wish it weren't so. It certainly needn't be! We have plenty of money in Western societies. You'd think, with all our material excess, we'd be living like ancient Athenian citizens dedicating our excess leisure time to the great thoughts and stimulating conversation. But instead we "hustle" all day and then veg out all night.
Please share the specifics! I’d love a post about your methods and mental models.
I'm shocked to read Robin Hanson, of all people, admit to a lack of curiosity for most of his life.
Of course relative to young children I suppose you could accuse us all of being incurious. But is that the right amount or type of the virtue?