Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Curiosity Kills

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 // This post is about: , ,