Assignable Curiosity

Elliot Temple
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In Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt presents a concept called "assignable curiosity". 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. People paying for creative, intellectual work (governments, corporations) often want it to serve them and be directed at the topics of their choice, rather than being freely-directed truth-seeking inquiry. They want the intellectuals who work for them to somewhat be rational, curious, questioning people and somewhat be biased, obedient people. Schmidt writes:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I don’t think I’ve understood this. I feel confused about the concept of assignable curiosity.

It means that authorities can tell people what to be curious about, e.g. telling a scientist what topics to research or not.

So might a person have ‘assignable curiosity’? Is that some feature (flaw?) about them, that they bring into each context with them? Or is it like contextual, when a scientist works for someone else and they don’t get to decide what they study, they have assignable curiosity?

Their curiosity follows assignments instead of being natural.

Like, they, for personality reasons, have to depend on external assignments for their own curiosity, in a secondhanded way?

People paying for creative, intellectual work (governments, corporations) often want it to serve them and be directed at the topics of their choice, rather than being freely-directed truth-seeking inquiry.

That makes sense that they’d want that for some things. Like they want to pay smart people to work on problems they want solved?

They want the intellectuals who work for them to somewhat be rational, curious, questioning people and somewhat be biased, obedient people.

I could imagine the company might not be interested in completely unbounded problem solving. Some things would be held immune from criticism like perhaps whether the company should exist, maybe, idk.

Assignable curiosity reminded me of something I’ve observed with video games: many players feel good and validated when succeeding at easy games. Game designers can be unquestioned authorities, similar to exam designers.

Right like they take for granted someone elses vision of success and they feel good when they achieve that success. They don’t say, oh that’s a dumb game because the critieria for winning is boring or too easy. Some games there is too much of a role that chance plays in it, specifically with board games. Like snakes a ladders is a stupid game, it’s just a dice rolling game. It doesn’t make sense that you could have fun doing it, because there is no skill to it. unless you were a child and the concept of playing a board was really new or something. I remember the first time I played backgammon it seemed like chance played too much of a role and didn’t leave enough room for skill, so I never played it again. I don’t really remember if that’s true, it just seemed like that.

One thing that made exam and game design decisions more visible to me was ambiguous test questions, which led to me mentally modeling exam makers in order to guess what they meant.

I don’t get the parallel there with game design decisions and ambiguous test questions.

Guessing the Teacher’s Password by Eliezer Yudkowsky (2007 essay) contrasts trying to learn about reality with trying to guess what answer a teacher wants.

I had a hard time understanding a lot of what was said in this article. I think perhaps there is a lot of jargon from EY’s philosophy that I don’t understand.

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Yeah the transistor was invented at Bell Labs! I’ve heard it referred to as the most important invention of the 20th century, and it makes sense.

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No, I don’t think what’s talked about here is a feature/attribute. It’s more that research and learning is naturally done by following your genuine curiosity. But company or the government will want you to do a specific type of research, so in a sense they’re giving you an assignment to go be curious about a topic. To get good research outcome being curious is helpful, so they want you to be curious about this topic even though you may not be very curious about it. It would be the same for learning. School tells you what to learn and learning is more effective when done out of curiosity.

So I would say it means that “assignable curiosity” is when some authority tells you to go be curious about something. Which often doesn’t work, or only works to some extent.

Partial curiosity: university students get to broadly choose the field they want to learn about, but then they may be required to take some sub-topics they aren’t interested in. And when they’re working on a specific sub-topic they like they’re still expected to think about the questions the professor wants them to solve instead of thinking about the questions they find interesting.

It does and I think it’s a good thing that it exists. I also think there should exist more free-range research like in Bell Labs because curiosity driven research is the most effective kind. More geniuses should be given more freedom and be trusted to follow their curiosity. That will likely lead to some people being wasted investments, but others would make massive breakthroughs. What knowledge areas of research will be useful isn’t obvious at all, especially before they’re discovered. An example is that number theory (at least parts of it) was thought to be totally useless, abstract and pure mathematics but now in the computer age it’s useful in cryptography.

Also research not ending in the desired outcomes aren’t really wasted. You then know which ways lead to dead ends and know better where to search in the future. You still learned something.

If in fact the company shouldn’t exist due to moral reasons, then rational and moral owners ought to want to know. They would think it wouldn’t be in their best interest for them to own such a company. There’s also the case where the company shouldn’t exist because it can’t be profitable.

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Ah okay. That’s different. yeah it’d be less effective. Yeah so when authorities pay people to work on problems for them, they can miss out on the actual drive and enthusiasm of a smart curious person pursuing questions they truly want answers to.

I think partly I was getting confused regarding the term. When I hear ‘assignable curiosity’, I think about a kind of curiosity which is unlike natural curiosity (which isn’t assignable). So I was wondering whether the idea was that the education system some how selects for people who can have assignable curiosity, and against those with natural curiosity through exams etc

I think maybe I object to the terminology, because ‘assignable curiosity’ sounds like a type of curiosity that in fact is assignable. My intution says ‘assigned curiosity’ works better for the meaning of the concept. The contrast of ‘natural curiosity’ to ‘assigned curiosity’ intuitively works better for me. Like it’s the same if I think of the concept ‘assignable love’. I don’t think love is assignable. But love could be assigned by some authority and it wouldn’t necessairly result in natural, actual love. ‘assignable’ seems to imply something about the nature of curiosity that I don’t think is true. Like you can assign curiosity as much as you want; doesn’t mean you’ll get it.

I’m not confident on my suggestions. But I do know my intuition has some problem with how the term and the concept match up. That could of course be due to still misunderstanding the concept.

Some people might not do much, but then again, that’s probably more of a risk in a context of assigned curiosity than natural curiosity. And it’ is a risk with hiring anyone in any context. If you hire people that at least get some good curiosity driven results, even if it’s not obvious what the uses of their results are yet, that’s like you say, not a waste (at least from an epistemological perspective(?))

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Assignable curiosity is curiosity which is capable of being assigned to a goal by someone telling you to.

If I tell you to be curious about knitting or accounting or baseball or whatever sounds really boring to you, you probably still won’t be. Even if you go try for a while, you’ll probably get bored and give up. Lots of kids find most of their school work boring and never get interested in most of their assignments. Lots of attempts to tell people what to be curious about don’t work. But some assignments do work on some people.

The claim is that some parts of our culture (school, parenting, authoritarian values, etc.) help create people whose curiosity can be given assignments instead of being natural (whatever that means, however that works). This helps provide industry with more weapons researchers. It broadly makes it easier for leaders/authorities to get more people to do the creative work the leader/authority wants.

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Okay cool thanks that makes more sense now.

How might a feature of a culture that benefits leaders/authorities like that come to exist? The leaders/authorities don’t design the culture. Static meme stuff? Maybe because culture isn’t perfect, various flaws end up being irrational and so work against people and on behalf of authorities?

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They do design some stuff and influence more. Modern public schools are a fairly recent thing that people did design, not an ancient tradition. And authoritarian ideas can be found in Plato and are older than that, so they’ve had a long time to influence culture – longer than e.g. Christianity which you can see influencing a lot of stuff.

Culture tends to cater to power. There are many mechanisms besides design, persuasion, suggestion. E.g. there are punishments, rewards, censorship, genocide, witch hunts.

In general, powerful people make more decisions and are biased (and influence/bias many decisions they don’t make), and this has been going on for millennia.

I have some skepticism re static memes e.g. Curiosity – The Historicism of David Deutsch

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Would the person actually become curious about the thing because they were told to? That would be different from being motivated to do the thing because they were told to do it.

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A wide range of things can happen. People can get interested in something they’re told to, or not. They can be told indirectly what to be interested in and then be biased towards that. Children’s TV shows, books and movies can bias children to be more open to weapons research (and misogyny and many other things) decades later.

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OK. I was thinking about it more directly like when teacher hand out assignments or a boss gives you a task. But direct assignment is also something people can have assignable curiosity for, right? Like they’ll actually get genuinely extra curious (extra as in more than before, not necessarily super curious) about the assignment because it was assigned, and not just motivated to get it done so that they’ll get a degree at the end?

If I was interested in reading a book because you recommended it, would that be assignable curiosity? Like that’s assignable curiosity I have especially reserved for you because I think highly of your judgment. And I would be less curious about other people’s recommendations. It depends on the subject of the book as well of course.

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Okay I can see that. And yeah when I think of most of human history, I think humans have probably lived in mostly hierarchical unfree societies.

Good point I agree. Plato’s authoritarian ideas were also popular ideas (not niche) and he was idolised by various authorities over the last ~2000 years.

Yeah I suppose if you have power, you can influence certain things like war and genocide etc. That would influence culture like you say.

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Do you get the essence of it? I don’t know all the jargon and Bayesian epistemology, but I think I understand the main point. Here’s a tweet I wanted to share in this topic, which tells about the same phenomena:

I once did Socratic demonstrations in hundreds of public schools across the country. I would go in, lead a discussion with students who had never experienced this before, and observe what happened. Very often the straight-A student, the kid who was best at school, would ask me: I don’t know what answer you want. Tell me what you want me to say.

They had been trained to figure out the teacher’s desired response and give it back. Thinking for themselves had literally never occurred to them as an option. They thought my open questions were some kind of trick.

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