The Death of Intellectual Curiosity

For any given subject or phenomenon, the y-axis (vertical) represents the complexity and the x-axis (horizontal) represents your degree of understanding. For any new subject, you start on the left with low complexity and low understanding. This means you have a lot of wrong assumptions and do not know how all the pieces fit together; you might thin... See more

So how do we make people intellectual curious? We do not need to, they already are. More accurately, they used to be. You see this curiosity is in children. They are learning machines asking questions all day, trying to figure out everything. Now a curious person might wonder: Why are there not many more intellectually curious adults? And that is e... See more

Overall this is a positive view of the future of education. People are already able to learn anything they want on their own with very little or no cost. The possibilities of educating yourself on the internet will only increase. To take advantage of this shift in education, the only thing you need is intellectual curiosity—to see learning as somet... See more

The questions we are trying to answer are as follows: why are some people curious and keep on learning throughout their lives and others do not? Why do most people stop learning after school? What happened to the quality of the education in universities?

Now we come back to the question from the start: Why do we not have more intellectually curious adults? The first reason is that people are intellectually lazy. This is not a novel observation but it explains part of the phenomenon. We need to keep in mind that when improving mental models, they get—at least at first—more complex. Things that seeme... See more

Intellectual curiosity not only matters for the book choices of individuals, it is—more importantly—also essential for the progress of society. People who keep on learning every day are the ones who create new technologies by trial and error and make our lives better. This curiosity-driven tinkering creates wealth in a positive-sum manner and is on... See more

Schools and universities also take all the fun out of learning by forcing everyone to study a subject in a rigid and planned manner. This is an inevitable drawback of educating a lot of people in the same way—only limited space for individuality; as a result studying topics gets more difficult and boring. The solution is autodidacticism—learning th... See more

The internet—as always—has already helped to solve this problem by providing a free market for education and knowledge. This not only improves the quality of the information—after filtering yourself—but also lowers the cost. There is no longer a central authority to decide what knowledge is “true” and “important enough” to be taught. The same thing... See more

Another problem is that especially in the social “sciences,” the exams are built on the principle of memorization. This means that people who are trying to understand something (if there is anything to understand at all) are at a disadvantage. Understanding takes more time and when only superficial facts are queried, it is unnecessary.