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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

August, 2013

Curiosity Kills

The debate on curiosity and its impact on society.
I'm a sucker for all quotes about how one thing or another was going to ruin society. Most of these are about media, but I couldn't help myself when I saw this one about curiosity from an article on The American Scholar:
Specific methods aside, critics argued that unregulated curiosity led to an insatiable desire for novelty—not to true knowledge, which required years of immersion in a subject. Today, in an ever-more-distracted world, that argument resonates. In fact, even though many early critics of natural philosophy come off as shrill and small-minded, it’s a testament to Ball that you occasionally find yourself nodding in agreement with people who ended up on the “wrong” side of history.
I actually think it would be pretty great to collect all these in a big book ... A paper book, of course.
August 8, 2013
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.