2026-03-16
minor update 2026-03-26
How much of curiosity is status-seeking?
Main
- Why did world war 2 lead to so much technological progress? What kind of weird species do I belong to - the type that builds atomically precise clocks and telescopes that see the edge of the universe and actual fucking thought processors, just to go wipe out its own neighbours more precisely and accurately.
- Why is it that when someone hands me the keys to (precursors of) literal Machine Godhood, my first response is to use it to obtain the secrets of my enemies and publicly humiliate them?
- Meditations on Moloch assumes incentives are this external thing that come and corrupt humans and prevent humans from making progress. I am like no, human desire to destroy its enemies is the very thing that enables human progress. These are not two separate things, they might be the same thing.
- A lot of scientific discoveries were egged on by peer rivalries.
- How much of human intellectual curiosity is just driven by status-seeking? It's unclear.
- Am I being intellectually curious right now, just to maximise odds of future Samuel having sex or emotional connection? Is there any way for me to even tell if that is true or not? If I was born in an alternate society where everyone was chemically castrated [1] as a kid, would I still be curious about technology? Such a society would obviously have different cultural messages and career paths and so on.
- [1] Technically accurate way to run this experiment is not to castrate human desire for sex but human desire for emotional connection. We don't yet know of drugs that do this.
Update
- PG talks a big game about why curiosity drives progress (both in science and in software startups), without analysing a lot about where this deep curiosity comes from.
- asked gpt-5 and its not clear to me:
Paul Graham on What you'll wish you'd known
Paul Graham on great work
gpt-5 says (may contain hallucins):
Graham seems to think deep intellectual curiosity comes from broad childhood curiosity becoming focused and durable, usually around an acquired fascination with some question, and then being strengthened by freedom, self-directed work, and exposure to genuinely interesting problems. He seems to think it comes less from discipline or external incentives than from real interest.
This answer is sus.
Update (2026-03-26)
- It's possible that scientists have always been intellectually curious, it is just that world war caused them to receive more funding from the political leaders, and more status (respect, sex, etc) from other members of their country.
Update
- It would be so insane if I had a gigapixel camera right now, such that I could reverse engineer everyone's social graphs and hence their thought streams. (Yes, I am still at the same tall building.)
Subscribe
Enter email or phone number to subscribe. You will receive atmost one update per month
Comment
Enter comment