<story><title>Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-brain.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WhompingWindows</author><text>A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation. There is some dopaminergic itch that must be scratched here, and I find like most itching, it doesn&amp;#x27;t end up paying off for more than a second.</text></item><item><author>shantly</author><text>Worth noting that the ability to indulge practically any idle curiosity (&amp;quot;who was that guy in that one movie again?&amp;quot;) with almost no effort is &lt;i&gt;very new&lt;/i&gt;. Unless you happened to have the relevant book of trivia, or maybe a good encyclopedia for some things, &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; you were at home or otherwise somewhere those were physically located, you couldn&amp;#x27;t find out without quite a bit of effort. That kind of stuff just dropped out of one&amp;#x27;s mind almost as quickly as it came up. You might ask the people around you, and if they couldn&amp;#x27;t remember, oh well, off it goes.&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to know something, you had to &lt;i&gt;work&lt;/i&gt; at it or &lt;i&gt;premeditate and spend time and&amp;#x2F;or money&lt;/i&gt; to be ready to find out information in a certain category (having the right books, mostly).&lt;p&gt;Your brain didn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;nag&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;insist&lt;/i&gt; that you go find it out &lt;i&gt;right now&lt;/i&gt;, generally, for every little question of near-zero importance that happened to cross your mind. That&amp;#x27;s a curse of the Internet age.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasode</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;, can we have screen-free time together?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;, or can we look at each other and shrug and move on with connecting with other humans and not screens.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wasn&amp;#x27;t there at your meetings so if you truly felt ignored, I can&amp;#x27;t argue with feelings.&lt;p&gt;That said, let me offer a different perspective:  someone quickly going to a smartphone screen to look something up that&amp;#x27;s relevant to our conversation shows they are &lt;i&gt;more engaged&lt;/i&gt; with me and our conversation.  It&amp;#x27;s like being in a professor&amp;#x27;s office and we discuss something and it prompts the professor to get up from his chair and pull a specific book from the shelf and page through it to clarify a fact.  That shows caring.  Or when you talk to a friend and you mention something about a specific place and they say &amp;quot;Oh, I happen to have a photo of that&amp;quot; so they go get their photo album and show it to me.  That&amp;#x27;s staying connected with our conversation.  I don&amp;#x27;t say, &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;I wish our real-life interactions were book-free and photo-album-free.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It really isn&amp;#x27;t the screen hardware that&amp;#x27;s the measure of (dis)engagement.  &lt;i&gt;It depends on what they&amp;#x27;re specifically doing on that screen.&lt;/i&gt;  If the person is distracted with typing Facebook replies, then yes, they&amp;#x27;re totally ignoring our conversation.  On the other hand, if they&amp;#x27;re visiting wikipedia or doing a google search to enhance our talk, that&amp;#x27;s great.&lt;p&gt;EDIT to add an example weaving in some &amp;quot;screen time&amp;quot; to enhance a conversation.  A priest talking to Google employees on how he uses their search engine during conversations with friends to clarify facts.  Deep link at 2m40s and watch for about 1 minute:  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=enDhX49F3XI&amp;amp;t=2m40s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=enDhX49F3XI&amp;amp;t=2m40s&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-brain.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WhompingWindows</author><text>A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation. There is some dopaminergic itch that must be scratched here, and I find like most itching, it doesn&amp;#x27;t end up paying off for more than a second.</text></item><item><author>shantly</author><text>Worth noting that the ability to indulge practically any idle curiosity (&amp;quot;who was that guy in that one movie again?&amp;quot;) with almost no effort is &lt;i&gt;very new&lt;/i&gt;. Unless you happened to have the relevant book of trivia, or maybe a good encyclopedia for some things, &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; you were at home or otherwise somewhere those were physically located, you couldn&amp;#x27;t find out without quite a bit of effort. That kind of stuff just dropped out of one&amp;#x27;s mind almost as quickly as it came up. You might ask the people around you, and if they couldn&amp;#x27;t remember, oh well, off it goes.&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to know something, you had to &lt;i&gt;work&lt;/i&gt; at it or &lt;i&gt;premeditate and spend time and&amp;#x2F;or money&lt;/i&gt; to be ready to find out information in a certain category (having the right books, mostly).&lt;p&gt;Your brain didn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;nag&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;insist&lt;/i&gt; that you go find it out &lt;i&gt;right now&lt;/i&gt;, generally, for every little question of near-zero importance that happened to cross your mind. That&amp;#x27;s a curse of the Internet age.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_Nat_</author><text>&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Check facts&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot; as in investigating tangential issues, or as in fact-checking assumptions?&lt;p&gt;If the latter, then that&amp;#x27;d seem very healthy.  People can come to all sorts of strange conclusions about topics like politics if they&amp;#x27;re allowed seemingly reasonable assumptions that they sincerely believe to be probably true.  If they&amp;#x27;re not fact-checked, then discussions on topics like politics can quickly devolve into meaningless hot air.&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia shows that the [principle of explosion](&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Principle_of_explosion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Principle_of_explosion&lt;/a&gt;) can quickly lead to absurd results in a few short examples, but the short examples are for brevity.  In common practice, it&amp;#x27;s long discussions involving a lot of seemingly innocent approximations&amp;#x2F;assumptions that get off the tracks so subtly that many folks don&amp;#x27;t seem to realize it. 
 ([Obligatory xkcd](&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xkcd.com&amp;#x2F;2217&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xkcd.com&amp;#x2F;2217&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;).)</text></comment>