Stupidity is usually just incuriosity
Leaving the company you founded + writing about your obsessions (Issue #277)
“The reality of a technical position,” writes systems administrator Cooper Lund, “is that most of what you do isn’t what people think counts as technical work like writing code — the majority of the work is being an investigator and a thinker.”
Essentially, his job is to be curious.
It’s true of most “knowledge work”: the job itself is primarily about how you solve problems, and arriving at a solution often comes from deep, relentless curiosity. “The older I get,” Lund writes, “the more I understand that there aren’t a lot of people who are stupid, but there are a lot of people who are incurious.” He refers to a story by Amy Schneider (who won 40 consecutive Jeopardy! games) as a prime example of how curiosity can enrich your life. It would be easy to dismiss Schneider as someone who simply memorized a bunch of trivia, but as she puts it:
…not only have I acquired the (fairly useless) knowledge of the definition of oviparous, I’ve gained greater insight into how our society organizes itself, and the motivations (and thus implicit biases) that drive scientists…
When you seek out the answer to anything — even something as obscure as the definition of oviparous (a term to describe birds that hatch eggs) — you’ll come across contextual information that reveals how the world works.
Lund thinks AI could threaten our curiosity by giving us easier, ready-made answers (he calls it an “incuriosity engine”). But that doesn’t have to happen! It’s up to each of us to safeguard our curiosity, and to keep questioning the responses we get from anyone or anything, human or bot. For a primer on stoking your own curiosity, I recommend this story from Clive Thompson. It describes a process he calls “rewilding your attention”—essentially, expanding your info sources so you have “wilder, curiouser thoughts.” One tip: diversify your search engines! Thompson recommends a few weirder search tools than Google or ChatGPT, like Marginalia Search, an “independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content.”
💼 Also today…
- Ash Jurberg describes how it feels to leave the company you founded and watch it grow without you: “The statistics say 80% of business partnerships end in divorce — double the rate of marriages — yet we’re somehow always surprised when it happens to us.”
- Author and podcaster Leah Nicole Whitcomb wants to read more stories by Black people that aren’t primarily about white supremacy.
- AI’s real purpose: focing us all to Try Harder. (Thomas Ricouard)
✍️ A dose of practical wisdom: On writing
“Writing isn’t about following a trend. It’s following the thing that won’t leave you alone” — Yrsa Daley-Ward
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Gillis
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