Comment on Use curiosity

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:07:56 GMT

A worthwhile goal is one that either you reflectively endorse as a terminal value, or a subgoal of a worthwhile goal.

It may not be practical to always trace your goals back to a terminal value, so heuristics such as checking for curiosity may useful, with the usual caveat that they will be less accurate than checking the hard way. I wonder if this heuristic works well for you because you are intuitively good at being curious about things worth knowing, so asking if you are curious taps into this intuitive strength.

Personally, I find I can believe I have a purpose while doing a lot of inefficient busy-work.

One technique that comes from my experience in computer science/software engineering, is to be aware of the resource requirements for solving the problem you are working on, where resource usually refers to time. For problems that seem to have large requirements, ask is there an approach with smaller resource requirements, or is there some reason it has to be that way? If you find a better approach take it, if it has to be that way, do it the hard way. If you find yourself getting stuck on these questions after putting in an appropriate amount of effort, this technique is not helping, revert to doing it the hard way. But the key here is to be aware of your requirements so you know to ask if they could be better.

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