This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2606-assignable-curiosity
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Whenever you talk about a book is that a slight suggestion that it may be worth reading? Or, unless you say otherwise, your just talking about a book but not in anyway recommending it?
I think that makes sense. Your giving money to this thing so you want something of value out of it. Its even worse when you don’t get something of value, but something detrimental (idk like researchers at Coke saying that coke is bad for you, thats worse than if they just did no research at all).
Hmm. I think research towards a goal like a product makes sense. I think this is vaguely what I think chemical companies do? Make/discover a chemical that achieves x. I think something like that is good. Versus, idk what to call it, stuff like asking about researching the health benefits of a product of a company can be problematic.
Quotes from A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.
Its employees were given extraordinary freedom. Figure out, a Bell researcher might be told, how “fundamental questions of physics or chemistry might someday affect communications.” Might someday—Bell researchers were encouraged to think decades down the road, to imagine how technology could radically alter the character of everyday life, to wonder how Bell might “connect all of us, and all of our new machines, together.” One Bell employee of a later era summarized it like this: “When I first came there was the philosophy: look, what you’re doing might not be important for ten years or twenty years, but that’s fine, we’ll be there then.”
The extraordinary freedom was a scientist’s dream, and the ability to work as they pleased drew together an astonishing set of minds.
Lots of modern computing was based on research from Bell Labs.
Shannon seems to have been purely motivated by intrinsic curiosity:
His was a life spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play; he was that rare scientific genius who was just as content rigging up a juggling robot or a flamethrowing trumpet as he was pioneering digital circuits. He worked with levity and played with gravity; he never acknowledged a distinction between the two. His genius lay above all in the quality of the puzzles he set for himself. And the marks of his playful mind—the mind that wondered how a box of electric switches could mimic a brain, and the mind that asked why no one ever decides to say “XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ”—are imprinted on all of his deepest insights.
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It’s probably more interesting than a random book but it’s not really a recommendation. You can think of it as a lead on something to evaluate for yourself whether you’re interested in it.
Is that bad? If coke is harming people, shouldn’t the executives want to know how to make a good beverage that can be sold for mutual benefit? Shouldn’t they be rushing to research beverages faster and more correctly than rivals like Pepsi, so they can be first to new discoveries and better products? And if they don’t want to know that their drink is bad, and they intentionally avoid finding that out, then wouldn’t they be liable for negligence and potentially have to pay for the damages they caused? Those scientists could potentially save the company from doing massive harm then going bankrupt. I know the courts aren’t great today but even so I think one is better off trying to run a company like Dagny Taggart or Hank Rearden would, rather than trying to exploit people’s inadequate defense against rights violations.
Quoting from ET’s article:
It means that authorities can tell people what to be curious about, e.g. telling a scientist what topics to research or not. Their curiosity follows assignments instead of being natural.
If the scientist is interested in something, there are reasons for that—even if only intuitive. I wonder if ET’s method for investigating intuitive disagreements (combined with rational debate) could be helpful here. That combo could enable companies to figure out whether there might be more value in pursuing the scientist’s curiosity/intuitions about what’s important. That could lead to something more valuable (like ActiveMind’s Bell Labs example).
They want the intellectuals who work for them to somewhat be rational, curious, questioning people and somewhat be biased, obedient people.
That reminds me of bounded vs unbounded discussion. In this case, I suppose the employers want bounded rationality.
ET quoting from the book, Disciplined Minds:
Today’s disillusioned professionals entered their fields expecting to do work that would “make a difference” in the world
I’d guess that by “make a difference”, creative professionals mean that they want to create something that is of value to the world. If the world values it, then that can be very profitable (not always, e.g., ET is creating enormous value but unpaid). So there could often be a way to have a win-win situation where both the creative professionals can “make a difference” and the company can make big profit.
ET quoting from the book, Disciplined Minds:
I describe how the intellectual boot camp known as graduate or professional school… systematically grinds down the student’s spirit and ultimately produces obedient thinkers… who do their assigned work without questioning its goals.
I like the boot camp analogy. Someone who worked in the military told me that they make recruits do tasks like dig holes and fill them back in again—deliberately pointless tasks like that—allegedly to get recruits used to unthinkingly following orders that seemingly don’t make sense.
Popper also wrote about how educators (or experiences or observations) cannot pour knowledge into the minds of students, like water into a bucket. He argued that people actively create their own knowledge, rather than passively receiving it
Curiosity is the same. You can’t pour (or command) curiosity into the mind of a creative professional. But I suppose curiosity is a type of knowledge.
Even DuPont and Phillip Morris did scientific research and found out their products were bad. Yes they covered it up and kept selling the products. But knowing was useful to the executives. You don’t want to give people cancer with a product that barely makes any money; you’d stop selling that product. You at least need to make a lot of money to make up for future lawsuits if you’re going to give people cancer. People will probably find out eventually.
Finding out your product is giving people cancer is also useful for bad people for timing their retirement and strategizing about how to handle investigations. Should you personally stake your reputation on your company being innocent and publicly fight it? Or maybe retire and pass the problem to someone else early on in the process before most people realize how much trouble your company is in?
Or, in a large company, if you know which departments are doing a lot of harm, you can delegate that stuff to other people and be personally involved in stuff that is legally safer for you.