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In this vein, classical ethicists talk about the vice of curiosity as opposed to the virtue of studiousness. Studiousness is the virtue of attention, of self-ma

In this vein, classical ethicists talk about the vice of curiosity as opposed to the virtue of studiousness. Studiousness is the virtue of attention, of self-mastery in relation to intellectual pursuits, of prudent allocation of attention to what you should; curiosity is the vice of inattention, of spreading yourself too thin, to pursue things other than what one should or what is not worth pursuing, pursuing that which is beyond your reach, of flitting about between things, of inordinate desire in the domain of intellectual pursuits. The studious man attains wisdom, the curious man remains, at best, a coasting, superficial dilettante. The difference between the studious man and the curious man is something like the difference between the committed and faithful husband and the waffling philanderer. The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity. In all these cases, desirable things may present themselves that would derail you from your aim and sabotage your achievement and your own good. In all these cases, commitment involves refusing to indulge those desires because doing so is counterproductive and harmful in relation to the good pursued. In life, we must make decisions. The word "decision" comes from the Latin "to cut off", as in to cut off options or paths. The grapevine must be pruned to strengthen it and produce more fruit. Of course, we must decide wisely, there is no question about that, but FOMO is the opposite of that. It is an intemperate and immoderate desire for everything, never committing to anything and therefore never attaining anything and never becoming anything.

echelon 4y ago
Make the wrong decision and you'll wish your curiosity had won the battle. It's all a fitness landscape. Once you have a good signal of a steep, yet tractable curve, it's time to hone in and focus. Otherwise you need to keep exploring. Within your exploration you need to know when to search and when to labor. You also need to know when you've sunk too much into a fruitless endeavor.
- taneq 4y ago
  Also, as always when reading advice, think about who's giving it. If you're writing for the masses, decrying fanciful curiosity and promoting narrow studious focus alters that fitness landscape significantly in favour of those who want to control those same masses. You don't want your workers running off to start their own enterprises, after all.
  - youssefabdelm 4y ago
    Excellent take that isn’t being mentioned
youssefabdelm 4y ago
And yet... if you don't have fun, it will never get done: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1177/0146167216676480 https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1177/0146167216676480 I definitely perceive partial truth to what you're saying but I wouldn't want people to confuse 'being disciplined' with what you're talking about. 'Being disciplined' just leads to burnout eventually, it's a way of the cortical (planning, future goals, losing weight) lying (foregoing good tasting food) to the thalamus ("give me good tasting food, feeling full, with the least amount of energy expenditure, NOW!") which will not succeed in the long run. The trick is to research how to make healthy food taste better than junk food, and take less energy to make. Since you will always go for the best ratio of cost-benefit, you will lose weight without struggle. I would rewrite the article as "If it's not a hard yes (in terms of BOTH immediate and long-term pleasure), it's a hard no"
- jbermudes 4y ago
  > And yet... if you don't have fun, it will never get done This was actually accounted for by the system of thought the parent comment is discussing. Since virtue is the median between two vices, there is a middle ground between focusing on nothing and focusing on something to the point of exhaustion. The virtue of eutrapelia. Thomas Aquinas argues that just as the body needs rest when it is weary, so too does the soul when it becomes overburdened. And, like the body, the soul takes rest in a kind of pleasure we call 'play'.
  - youssefabdelm 4y ago
    Hm am I incorrect in my interpretation that what you're talking about is a kind of 'relaxation/rewarding oneself' after 'pushing oneself/working hard'? What I'm talking about is a synthesis of play and work, where work becomes play, as opposed to playing, resting, or relaxing, after or as a 'reward for' work (which would not qualify as immediate reward. Immediate reward = in a fraction of a second.) The 'work itself is the reward' if one carefully chooses what the work entails.
    - jbermudes 4y ago
guerrilla 4y ago
> classical ethicists Can you name some examples of who you're talking about?
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  A good number of classical and medieval philosophers touch on this subject either explicitly or tacitly (that is, generally), such as when they discuss the virtues (prudence and temperance seem the most relevant; the vice of curiosity is opposed to temperance in a rather obvious way, and to prudence perhaps secondarily as no one acting out of curiosity is acting prudently, which is not surprising give that there is a relation of dependence and presupposition between the virtues). Off the top of my head, Thomas Aquinas uses the words "studiousness"[0] and "curiosity"[1] explicitly. If you google around, I'm sure you will find more material (like this[2] or this[3]). [0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q166 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q166 [1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q167 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q167 [2] https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/McInerny/McInerny11.pdf https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/McInerny/McInerny11.pdf [3] https://www.primematters.com/foundations/search-truth/studiositas-and-curiositas https://www.primematters.com/foundations/search-truth/studio...
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Hmmm... your last link seems to say that studiositas and curiositas are pretty far from modern English's "studious and curious." It seems that studiositas is literally just intellectual temperance, whereas curiositas is the opposite, which rather than curiosity would be excessive curiosity; moderate curiosity (i.e. intellectual temperance) being good. But that mostly agrees with what you said given the substitutions, if we take "curiositas" = "vice of curiosity", etc. It definitely does sound like Aquinas though with his symmetries and obsession with balance.
    - jerf 4y ago
      "Hmmm... your last link seems to say that studiositas and curiositas are pretty far from modern English's "studious and curious." If you want to get into classical philosophy you're going to run into that left, right, front, and center. Many words and concepts they take for granted either correspond to old English words (and I mean old as in time, not as in formaly Old English, though they may be that too), or simply no longer exist in English. Thus, reading translations of them may be quite challenging. Personally I don't think it's because those concepts are necessarily inapplicable or that we're so much better, nor do I necessarily think we're so much worse either. If anything I see it as a very valuable way to get a very different perspective on philosophical issues. However, it will take substantial effort put in to understand what they're really saying; to use very modern terminology, the representational bias of modern English is almost incapable of expressing what they are actually saying. While I won't blindly endorse everything they say, I will say it is also not as stupid as it may sound at first when read in modern English, nor vacuous, nor any other quick dismissal than may come to mind.
makeitdouble 4y ago
First, thanks for the interesting take. It kinda made me wonder why I felt so uncomfortable reading it, and I think it's the very deep religious philosophy that shines from it. Curiosity is fundamentally a desire to discover things by one-self and uncover hidden things. It goes against authoritative advice ("kills the cat") and is self motivated. It is basically the opposite of blind trust, faith. A vice. Studiousness was the core virtue of monks, and they were the spearhead of shuting down distractions to focus on a single goal. This is basically the advice we'd give to people to stop looking at the birds, to focus on plowing the field in front of them.
- elboru 4y ago
  And thanks to monk studiousness, hundreds of classical books were preserved during the dark ages, after Rome fell. We also got a lot of technology preserved and actively invented by them.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    Some monks and monasteries in general were of course pretty inventive and contributed to technology advancement. Yet I think those were fundamentally incremental and were more based in craftsmanship than in field shifting insights. For instance during the “dark ages” we saw construction technique leap forward (think cathedrals like Paris’ one), accounting techniques saw the shift to double entry book-keeping, and so many deeply impacting innovations that didn’t cone from monks while they were supposed to have such knowledge and education. You mention classical books reproduction which was a important occupation for monks, yet the printing revolution came from a completely different direction. Not rocking the boat was a principle they adhered to that basically tied their hand.
- bombcar 4y ago
  If it makes you feel better, Aristotle talks about the same thing, as does Socrates, in the same books where they argue against the blind trust/faith in many things. We also use the word curiosity slightly differently - the older form is found in "curiosity killed the cat". The ancient philosophy term that would be closer to what we may mean by curiosity now is wonder.
notefaker 4y ago
I think both curiosity and studiousness can exist together. The vice of curiosity has led me down many new, exciting paths of learning that have changed my life and career in marvelous ways. When you say.. > prudent allocation of attention to what you should How do we even define "what" outside of a basic moral context? "What" is a constant moving target throughout life, something extremely personal that's based on our experiences and knowledge. I say stay curious.
stavros 4y ago
Why?
feoren 4y ago
Let's say you're a talented, smart, dedicated person and you want to get as good as you possibly can in one focused field. Let's assume it involves some creativity, so we're talking becoming a virtuoso violinist, a world-leading Hydroelectric Dam engineer, architect, RAID firmware developer, whatever. (So not something like the 100-yard dash, where creativity is a very small part.) What should you do? Consider Bob, the virtuous, studious person, who is opposed to that vicious "curiosity" that would distract him from his goal, spends all his time studying and practicing and focusing on his very narrow subject. Think about building a building as tall as you possibly can -- that's their knowledge tower. Taller! Taller! More focused, more specialized! But once he's read all the books and journal articles on the subject, how can he keep getting better? Where do new ideas come from? Just more practice, the same thing over and over? That works well for running a marathon, but not for creative work. Now consider Alice, the vicious, curious person, also wanting to get as good as possible in a focused field, but often distracted by her general intellectual curiosity. She doesn't read every book and journal article in the field, but she's read a lot of them (most of the way through) and is aware of the general ideas presented in most of the others. Think of the 80/20 power-law rules; this person, devoting half her time to the focused subject, is probably about 80% to 90% as knowledgeable about the deep, focused field as the person who devoted all his time to it. Meanwhile, she has a wellspring of fresh ideas from a wide range of related disciplines (and everything is all related, one way or another). The thing about world-leading experts in creative fields is that they're constantly facing problems that nobody has ever solved before. When Bob The Studious faces such a problem, he needs to invent the solution wholesale by a mutation on his existing body of knowledge. He has no raw memetic material to cross-breed with to explore the solution space. But Alice does! She doesn't need to rely on the slow and random process of mutation; she has a wealth of other memetic material to cross-breed with her (somewhat more limited) specialist knowledge. Nobody in RAID Firmware design has solved that particular problem before, but it looks a little bit like a hobby project she read about a few months ago involving a Raspberry PI, and didn't they have to deal with something like this on the space shuttle? Hold on, I think I bookmarked that ... Virtuoso musicians know that practicing 4 to 6 hours per day is better than practicing 10 hours per day. Instead, go listen genre of music you don't like, read about the between Baroque and Classical music, play around with an instrument you've never touched before, or even just space out and go on a walk.
snarf21 4y ago
This is interesting to think about but I disagree with the framing of the example: The studious man marries the first person they date and commits to life-long faithfulness regardless of any potential misalignment. The curious man dates lots of people trying to learn both if they want to get married and what they want out of such a life-long faithful commitment. All people are a combination of both curious and studious. It reminds me of a question I've had quite often and had lots of good conversation about: Does learning make you less able to learn? When you "learn" something and accept it as a de-facto truth, you can be very studious from that base. However, doing so limits your ability to be curious and explore contractions to that baseline. Most modern discoveries are built on curious, by questioning the status quo. THEN, committing to that curiosity in a studious fashion.
naveen99 4y ago
choosing your search strategy depends on the data, depth first, breadth first, or neural network based / gradient descent / greedy. No free lunch, no universal strategy.
mckravchyk 4y ago
Reminds me of a remark made about Michael Jordan by one of his coaches in his "Relentless" book: > For all of Michael’s amazing moves and unforgettable moments, he knew none of that could happen without the fundamentals. Those basic moves he had practiced over and over and over since he was a kid made everything else possible. He didn’t work on being flashy, he worked on being consistent, and he worked on it relentlessly. Cleaners don’t care about instant gratification; they invest in the long-term payoff. I also recognize something Bruce Lee said about martial arts techniques, that the techniques that are pleasing to the eye are not very good, that the best stuff that works is boring and simple, and one has to develop that taste, not unlike developing a taste for wines. I found the quote: > “Some martial arts are very popular, real crowd pleasers, because they look good, have smooth techniques. but beware.They are like a wine that has been watered. A diluted wine is not a real wine, nto a good wine, hardly the genuine article. Some martial arts don’t look so good, but you know that they have a kick, a tang, a genuine taste. They are like olives. The taste may be strong and bittersweet. The flavour lasts. You cultivate a taste for them. NO one ever developed a taste for diluted wine” In response to; > The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity I don't agree with your example by the way. There are many variables. For example, the former may be lazy and undisciplined with his life in general, but is faithful regardless for whatever reason (it's also easy to imagine that monk-like discipline is not necessarily always the only factor that keeps men in committed relationships from cheating). The latter may just consider polygamy as a lifestyle choice for a certain period of time but be very disciplined with his life nevertheless. It's not correct to derive assumptions about one's discipline purely based on the type of relationships one engages.

echelon 4y ago

Make the wrong decision and you'll wish your curiosity had won the battle. It's all a fitness landscape. Once you have a good signal of a steep, yet tractable curve, it's time to hone in and focus. Otherwise you need to keep exploring. Within your exploration you need to know when to search and when to labor. You also need to know when you've sunk too much into a fruitless endeavor.

taneq 4y ago
Also, as always when reading advice, think about who's giving it. If you're writing for the masses, decrying fanciful curiosity and promoting narrow studious focus alters that fitness landscape significantly in favour of those who want to control those same masses. You don't want your workers running off to start their own enterprises, after all.
- youssefabdelm 4y ago
  Excellent take that isn’t being mentioned

youssefabdelm 4y ago

And yet... if you don't have fun, it will never get done: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1177/0146167216676480 https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1177/0146167216676480 I definitely perceive partial truth to what you're saying but I wouldn't want people to confuse 'being disciplined' with what you're talking about. 'Being disciplined' just leads to burnout eventually, it's a way of the cortical (planning, future goals, losing weight) lying (foregoing good tasting food) to the thalamus ("give me good tasting food, feeling full, with the least amount of energy expenditure, NOW!") which will not succeed in the long run. The trick is to research how to make healthy food taste better than junk food, and take less energy to make. Since you will always go for the best ratio of cost-benefit, you will lose weight without struggle. I would rewrite the article as "If it's not a hard yes (in terms of BOTH immediate and long-term pleasure), it's a hard no"

jbermudes 4y ago
> And yet... if you don't have fun, it will never get done This was actually accounted for by the system of thought the parent comment is discussing. Since virtue is the median between two vices, there is a middle ground between focusing on nothing and focusing on something to the point of exhaustion. The virtue of eutrapelia. Thomas Aquinas argues that just as the body needs rest when it is weary, so too does the soul when it becomes overburdened. And, like the body, the soul takes rest in a kind of pleasure we call 'play'.
- youssefabdelm 4y ago
  Hm am I incorrect in my interpretation that what you're talking about is a kind of 'relaxation/rewarding oneself' after 'pushing oneself/working hard'? What I'm talking about is a synthesis of play and work, where work becomes play, as opposed to playing, resting, or relaxing, after or as a 'reward for' work (which would not qualify as immediate reward. Immediate reward = in a fraction of a second.) The 'work itself is the reward' if one carefully chooses what the work entails.
  - jbermudes 4y ago

guerrilla 4y ago

> classical ethicists Can you name some examples of who you're talking about?

lo_zamoyski 4y ago
A good number of classical and medieval philosophers touch on this subject either explicitly or tacitly (that is, generally), such as when they discuss the virtues (prudence and temperance seem the most relevant; the vice of curiosity is opposed to temperance in a rather obvious way, and to prudence perhaps secondarily as no one acting out of curiosity is acting prudently, which is not surprising give that there is a relation of dependence and presupposition between the virtues). Off the top of my head, Thomas Aquinas uses the words "studiousness"[0] and "curiosity"[1] explicitly. If you google around, I'm sure you will find more material (like this[2] or this[3]). [0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q166 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q166 [1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q167 https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q167 [2] https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/McInerny/McInerny11.pdf https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/McInerny/McInerny11.pdf [3] https://www.primematters.com/foundations/search-truth/studiositas-and-curiositas https://www.primematters.com/foundations/search-truth/studio...
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Hmmm... your last link seems to say that studiositas and curiositas are pretty far from modern English's "studious and curious." It seems that studiositas is literally just intellectual temperance, whereas curiositas is the opposite, which rather than curiosity would be excessive curiosity; moderate curiosity (i.e. intellectual temperance) being good. But that mostly agrees with what you said given the substitutions, if we take "curiositas" = "vice of curiosity", etc. It definitely does sound like Aquinas though with his symmetries and obsession with balance.
  - jerf 4y ago
    "Hmmm... your last link seems to say that studiositas and curiositas are pretty far from modern English's "studious and curious." If you want to get into classical philosophy you're going to run into that left, right, front, and center. Many words and concepts they take for granted either correspond to old English words (and I mean old as in time, not as in formaly Old English, though they may be that too), or simply no longer exist in English. Thus, reading translations of them may be quite challenging. Personally I don't think it's because those concepts are necessarily inapplicable or that we're so much better, nor do I necessarily think we're so much worse either. If anything I see it as a very valuable way to get a very different perspective on philosophical issues. However, it will take substantial effort put in to understand what they're really saying; to use very modern terminology, the representational bias of modern English is almost incapable of expressing what they are actually saying. While I won't blindly endorse everything they say, I will say it is also not as stupid as it may sound at first when read in modern English, nor vacuous, nor any other quick dismissal than may come to mind.

makeitdouble 4y ago

First, thanks for the interesting take. It kinda made me wonder why I felt so uncomfortable reading it, and I think it's the very deep religious philosophy that shines from it. Curiosity is fundamentally a desire to discover things by one-self and uncover hidden things. It goes against authoritative advice ("kills the cat") and is self motivated. It is basically the opposite of blind trust, faith. A vice. Studiousness was the core virtue of monks, and they were the spearhead of shuting down distractions to focus on a single goal. This is basically the advice we'd give to people to stop looking at the birds, to focus on plowing the field in front of them.

elboru 4y ago
And thanks to monk studiousness, hundreds of classical books were preserved during the dark ages, after Rome fell. We also got a lot of technology preserved and actively invented by them.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Some monks and monasteries in general were of course pretty inventive and contributed to technology advancement. Yet I think those were fundamentally incremental and were more based in craftsmanship than in field shifting insights. For instance during the “dark ages” we saw construction technique leap forward (think cathedrals like Paris’ one), accounting techniques saw the shift to double entry book-keeping, and so many deeply impacting innovations that didn’t cone from monks while they were supposed to have such knowledge and education. You mention classical books reproduction which was a important occupation for monks, yet the printing revolution came from a completely different direction. Not rocking the boat was a principle they adhered to that basically tied their hand.
bombcar 4y ago
If it makes you feel better, Aristotle talks about the same thing, as does Socrates, in the same books where they argue against the blind trust/faith in many things. We also use the word curiosity slightly differently - the older form is found in "curiosity killed the cat". The ancient philosophy term that would be closer to what we may mean by curiosity now is wonder.

notefaker 4y ago

I think both curiosity and studiousness can exist together. The vice of curiosity has led me down many new, exciting paths of learning that have changed my life and career in marvelous ways. When you say.. > prudent allocation of attention to what you should How do we even define "what" outside of a basic moral context? "What" is a constant moving target throughout life, something extremely personal that's based on our experiences and knowledge. I say stay curious.

stavros 4y ago

Why?

feoren 4y ago

Let's say you're a talented, smart, dedicated person and you want to get as good as you possibly can in one focused field. Let's assume it involves some creativity, so we're talking becoming a virtuoso violinist, a world-leading Hydroelectric Dam engineer, architect, RAID firmware developer, whatever. (So not something like the 100-yard dash, where creativity is a very small part.) What should you do? Consider Bob, the virtuous, studious person, who is opposed to that vicious "curiosity" that would distract him from his goal, spends all his time studying and practicing and focusing on his very narrow subject. Think about building a building as tall as you possibly can -- that's their knowledge tower. Taller! Taller! More focused, more specialized! But once he's read all the books and journal articles on the subject, how can he keep getting better? Where do new ideas come from? Just more practice, the same thing over and over? That works well for running a marathon, but not for creative work. Now consider Alice, the vicious, curious person, also wanting to get as good as possible in a focused field, but often distracted by her general intellectual curiosity. She doesn't read every book and journal article in the field, but she's read a lot of them (most of the way through) and is aware of the general ideas presented in most of the others. Think of the 80/20 power-law rules; this person, devoting half her time to the focused subject, is probably about 80% to 90% as knowledgeable about the deep, focused field as the person who devoted all his time to it. Meanwhile, she has a wellspring of fresh ideas from a wide range of related disciplines (and everything is all related, one way or another). The thing about world-leading experts in creative fields is that they're constantly facing problems that nobody has ever solved before. When Bob The Studious faces such a problem, he needs to invent the solution wholesale by a mutation on his existing body of knowledge. He has no raw memetic material to cross-breed with to explore the solution space. But Alice does! She doesn't need to rely on the slow and random process of mutation; she has a wealth of other memetic material to cross-breed with her (somewhat more limited) specialist knowledge. Nobody in RAID Firmware design has solved that particular problem before, but it looks a little bit like a hobby project she read about a few months ago involving a Raspberry PI, and didn't they have to deal with something like this on the space shuttle? Hold on, I think I bookmarked that ... Virtuoso musicians know that practicing 4 to 6 hours per day is better than practicing 10 hours per day. Instead, go listen genre of music you don't like, read about the between Baroque and Classical music, play around with an instrument you've never touched before, or even just space out and go on a walk.

snarf21 4y ago

This is interesting to think about but I disagree with the framing of the example: The studious man marries the first person they date and commits to life-long faithfulness regardless of any potential misalignment. The curious man dates lots of people trying to learn both if they want to get married and what they want out of such a life-long faithful commitment. All people are a combination of both curious and studious. It reminds me of a question I've had quite often and had lots of good conversation about: Does learning make you less able to learn? When you "learn" something and accept it as a de-facto truth, you can be very studious from that base. However, doing so limits your ability to be curious and explore contractions to that baseline. Most modern discoveries are built on curious, by questioning the status quo. THEN, committing to that curiosity in a studious fashion.

naveen99 4y ago

choosing your search strategy depends on the data, depth first, breadth first, or neural network based / gradient descent / greedy. No free lunch, no universal strategy.

mckravchyk 4y ago

Reminds me of a remark made about Michael Jordan by one of his coaches in his "Relentless" book: > For all of Michael’s amazing moves and unforgettable moments, he knew none of that could happen without the fundamentals. Those basic moves he had practiced over and over and over since he was a kid made everything else possible. He didn’t work on being flashy, he worked on being consistent, and he worked on it relentlessly. Cleaners don’t care about instant gratification; they invest in the long-term payoff. I also recognize something Bruce Lee said about martial arts techniques, that the techniques that are pleasing to the eye are not very good, that the best stuff that works is boring and simple, and one has to develop that taste, not unlike developing a taste for wines. I found the quote: > “Some martial arts are very popular, real crowd pleasers, because they look good, have smooth techniques. but beware.They are like a wine that has been watered. A diluted wine is not a real wine, nto a good wine, hardly the genuine article. Some martial arts don’t look so good, but you know that they have a kick, a tang, a genuine taste. They are like olives. The taste may be strong and bittersweet. The flavour lasts. You cultivate a taste for them. NO one ever developed a taste for diluted wine” In response to; > The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity I don't agree with your example by the way. There are many variables. For example, the former may be lazy and undisciplined with his life in general, but is faithful regardless for whatever reason (it's also easy to imagine that monk-like discipline is not necessarily always the only factor that keeps men in committed relationships from cheating). The latter may just consider polygamy as a lifestyle choice for a certain period of time but be very disciplined with his life nevertheless. It's not correct to derive assumptions about one's discipline purely based on the type of relationships one engages.