My Mother knew the old fashioned meaning of the word "curious." To her curious meant strange. If you said someone was curious you meant they were strange, eccentric, weird. Today curious is a good word. It IS good to be curious, isn't it?
This is a book about curiosity. Some of the points raised in the book arouse my curiosity.
If there is one great takeaway from this book it is this. Because of Google and Wikipedia knowledge is not obsolete like some fools say; knowledge is king. You can't think and solve and analyze if you don't have a proper knowledge base.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is necessary for the good life for us humans.
"I have no special talents," said Albert Einstein. "I am just passionately curious."
Rather than just getting more people to school and university the new challenge is to find ways of making more people hungry to learn, question, and create. The world is in need of more curious learners. P. XV
Light curiosity is diversive curiosity. Epistemic curiosity is deep curiosity. P. XX
Empathic curiosity is curiosity about the thoughts and feelings of others. P. XX1
Curiosity is contagious. So is incuriosity. P. XX11
The world is in need of more curious learners. P. 15
In Roman times curiosity was considered a bodily urge, like an appetite, which had both its good and bad features. P. 60
Curiosity wasn't always considered a positive trait. Saint Augustine discounted it. P. 60
Economist John Maynard Keynes once offered advice on how to conduct oneself in a bookstore. "A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookstore, dipping in it as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon's entertainment." Unlike Google where you are supposed to know what you are looking for. A truly curious person doesn't always know what he wants to know about. P. 73
The Web is easier to search than ever, but it doesn't necessarily stoke our curiosity. Curiosity is sustained by unanswered questions but Google never says "I don't know." P. 74
"Good bookstores are still better than Amazon at attracting your attention to books you've never heard of before or didn't set out to acquire (a recent study found that people are twice as likely to buy a book on impulse in a bookstore than online). In this way the old media were better at broadening our horizons." P. 75
The internet can make happily ignorant of what we don't know and what we don't know that we don't know. P. 75
Online research is more efficient than library research but it has the effect of shrinking the scope of investigation. P. 76
Information may flow liberally but out attention span is parochial and tribal. P. 76
The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. P. 86
We are at the point of a great polarization between the curious and the incurious. P. 86
The more we know the better we are at thinking. P. 118
Darwin was influenced by Malthus. P. 152
(Henry) James didn't feel the need to go chasing after experience, preferring to discover what was interesting in the experiences he had. P. 173
You can take anything and by paying close attention to it make it interesting. P. 173
The key to a successful retirement may be to find a way to make a boring life interesting. P. 175
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