Cultivating Curiosity

One of my primary motivations in starting this blog was to give myself more of a nudge to be curious. I want to spend more time asking, answering, and reflecting on questions that I find interesting. Curiosity is one of the mental muscles that have atrophied most during my adult life, and it's not hard to see why. American education is more about sorting students into buckets than nurturing their individuality. It isn't until the most advanced degrees of education such as getting a PhD, which most students don't matriculate into, where you are rewarded for the quality of your questions and the voracity with which you pursue those questions. Most of schooling until that point is about how well you consume information and demonstrate that consumption.

In my professional life, I have a very challenging and engaging job as an engineering manager at a growing startup, but it only rewards a narrow expression of curiosity. One reason it tamps curiosity is because it is very demanding and busy. It's hard to let your mind wander and explore when it's under cognitive load. Another reason, which is somewhat intrinsic to the role, is that a primary goal of engineering management (and most corporate functions, in one form or another) is to routinize processes as much as possible. To meet the demands of a growing business, the engineering function has to become predictable and predictably scalable, i.e, if we add X more people, we can deliver Y more features. This is more of an optimization problem, and solving that problem does require some amount interest and curiosity, but it needs to be scoped to certain types of problems. The type of curiosity I'm trying to cultivate is one that will permeate across domains.

A fair question at this stage would be, if my education and avocation don't seem to reward curiosity, why cultivate it? First off, curiosity is self-reinforcing. People with a curious mind seem to have a mental motor that works differently. The fire of curiosity can find tinder anywhere it roams, because there is a positive feedback loop between asking questions and answering them because those answers lead to follow up questions. By contrast, after a long day at work, I'm ready to disconnect and do something else. The ethos of the curious mind seems to align more with the type of inner life I want to have. Secondly, curiosity is rewarding. Going through life with the same routine every day, with blinders on to the wonders of what's around you is frankly just boring. Choosing to see the things around you not as uninteresting backdrops, but phenomena with hidden mechanisms, imbues you with an appreciation and a sense of wonder that makes more interesting than a set of routines and obligations.

Over the past couple weeks, I decided to take the first steps to push myself to be more curious. I'm wary of systematizing this too much, because I don't want being curious to become a chore or an item to check off my to do list. I want to cultivate curiosity in a way that's consistent with the benefits I mentioned above, that is, in a manner that can be self-reinforcing and rewarding. However, I do think that some structure is necessary in order to build this new muscle. So, I decided to try asking three questions every day.  Just asking, not answering -- I didn't want my initial steps towards becoming more curious to entail having a new research project to do every day. I want to build the muscle, not establish a whole training program. Below, I am including the questions I asked over the last two weeks. I have no idea what sort of reading this will make for -- these could be moderately interesting questions or totally bizarre and unintelligible. Or who knows, maybe one of these questions will cause you to wonder about something and ask some questions of your own.

01/15

1. Why is sleeping in a hospital - soft mattresses, loud noises, lots of lights - so shitty?
2. For sleep studies, why are you uncomfortably hooked up to a million different wires, is there higher end equipment that is more comfortable that would yield the same sleep metrics?
3. What entity makes the equipment in traffic lights, crosswalk signs, etc? Is it the government, a government contractor? How often does this equipment need to be replaced or serviced?
4. How does the 8sleep work - how does it keep the bed cool, how much power does it use, how does it sense warmth?
5. What is the science behind seeing your breath outside when it's cold?
6. What is the trash collection schedule in Boston?
7. Did less travel during the pandemic make any positive impact on climate change?
8. What is the math/theory behind solving a Rubik's cube?

01/16

9. Why can't people remember their dreams? Why can't people remember wake events at night - is it lack of sensory hooks, period of time while being awake, or something else?
10. How many people ride the Boston red line per day? What is the maintenance schedule on a particular subway car?
11. Why are whole bean coffee beans better than ground coffee?

01/17

12. Why did Sears go out of business but other physical retailers didn't?
13. Can women (who have undergone a change of gender) give birth?
14. Why does organic milk last longer?

01/18

15. Which online prediction market is most efficient/accurate?
16. When were "forever chemicals" first introduced? Which products today have the most forever chemicals?
17. Do big tech companies include space in their budget for GDPR fines?
18. What is the purpose of chip cards?
19. Why is inflation caused by supply chain disruptions and Russia/Ukraine? Why are supply chain disruptions caused by COVID?

01/19

20. Are there any places where compost is a municipal/city provided service?
21. Why does the fed need to raise interest rates? What consequence does that have?
22. Why don't any podcasting apps have comments on individual episodes?
23. Why is there a compulsion to multi-task when it's obviously unproductive and exhausting?
24. Where does the term "gaslighting" originate from?
25. How does NyQuil work?

01/20

26. How do mRNA vaccines work? Why are they so effective / enable quicker vaccine developments?
27. What technical innovations have Tesla and SpaceX made?
28. What is fermentation?

01/21

29. Why do sugar and alcohol decrease HRV?
30. How are movie soundtracks created; what is the process?
31. When and where did restauranteur culture begin?

01/22

32. What does tapping a beer can before opening actually do?
33. What is the difference between LEDs and incandescent bulbs?
34. Is it possible to measure dopamine? Has anyone done population wide measurements of dopamine to determine if people today have higher/spikier levels of dopamine?
35. How are protein, fat, and carbohydrates metabolized differently by your body?

01/23

36. How do AC units work?
37. Why are the names Union, Broadway, and Main ubiquitous across American cities?
38. How do glasses work?

01/24

39. How accurate are polygraph tests? Why aren't people hooked up to polygraphs in court/when under oath?
40. Are there any email tools that allow you to notify all users at a certain time in their timezone?
41. Why do leap years exist?
42. Why are Tesla shareholders suing Musk for his "funding secured" tweets in 2018, given that the tweets caused the stock to sharply increase in 2 days?

01/25

43. What is the difference between the Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq? Why do we have multiple exchanges?
44. Why are quantum computers faster?
45. What does Kafka-esque mean & why?

01/26

47. Which country has the most robust tourist economy?
48. What tools do researchers use for modeling biospheres?
49. How are high precision machines made?

01/27

50. Has anyone ever measured electrical signals in high performance athletes/musicians?
51. What is the current status of a GPT3 for music?
52. What is the difference between whey protein/pea protein/etc?

01/28

53. What is the difference between 5G and LTE?
54. What is McDonald's price point in different parts of the world?
55. What is the current state of cloning in animals?

01/29

56. Why do pharmacy drugs have weird names?
57. What does "virgin" mean in extra virgin olive oil?
58. Why does drinking coffee increase your heart rate as opposed to just keeping you in a normal wakeful state for longer (given that caffeine binds to adenosine receptors and buildup of adenosine is what makes you feel sleepy)?
    

I got a little worried midway through that I would run out of things to ask, but as philosophized, curiosity is self-reinforcing. Getting better and more inclined to ask questions is a skill, and the world is a big enough place that there are boundless opportunities to practice that skill. I also noticed (anecdotally, not through any rigorous recording) that most of my questions were asked post-walk or before bed. This seems to make sense - these are the times when I have the most mental space from day to day demands of my job. Overall though, I really enjoyed this process and plan to keep it going. There was something gratifying about realizing I don't know a particular thing about the world and having the presence of mind to ask. Going forward, I am excited to use this blog as a vehicle for not just cultivating curiosity, but satisfying it.

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