I approve strongly! Publicly-posted exercises may yield practice, practice yields habit, and habit yields changed behavior. Developing deeper, more-focused curiosity would be a grand step towards becoming more awesome. But!

( summary: It is important to practice this skill at appropriate times, like when it is useful and feasible to work on answering the given question, and not just at random, or whenever it's convenient to schedule the practice. I plan to attach a reminder to my research to-do list.)

Alright, says I, this exercise seems plausible enough. So I'll start practicing this exercise and see how well it works. But how ought I do this for regular practice?

At first, I thought about walking through this list as part of my morning routine. But how would I actually do that? The exercise needs an unanswered question, and I don't generally have a fresh, new, important question every morning. So:

• If I pick an arbitrary question I don't know the answer to, I should be able to import the feeling of uncertainty, but clear evaluation of the consequences of being wrong will be demotivating, and the Litany of Gendlin will be silly.
• If I pick an important question I don't know the answer to, then I suspect that I can use this exercise to get myself quite motivated to better answer it. In the context of my morning routine, though, this would be terrible. My morning routine is optimized for satisfying basic needs, waking up quickly, and getting to my office at a reasonable hour. This form of the exercise, if effective, would actually conflict sharply with my long-term goals.

In fact, I suspect that intense curiosity about any random topic, at any random time, is actually a bad idea. For instance, if I'm on a several-hours drive, by myself, and by random musing I become intensely curious about how to resolve (say) anthropic probabilities. I don't know much about the real arguments in anthropics, so I'm just going to be frustrated at my situation. Eventually, I'll think about something else, and the curiosity will pass before I can use it. (And now I've associated that particular curiosity with frustration, and my inability to satisfy it, and perhaps next time I won't become curious so readily.)

What we want, then, is the ability to get curious about a question because we recognize that we'd like to answer it. When we have a verbal justification to resolve some question correctly, we want to invoke the appropriate emotions as motivation to do so. We want to practice this invocation. I don't see how to do this as part of my morning routine, to admit convenient, regular practice.

So, I now plan attach the reminder near where I manage the relevant to-do list. Any time Ι start a block of time aimed (even indirectly) at answering some question, I'll run through this exercise for that question. I hope to develop this habit so that when I'm reading for pleasure, or satisfying my own interest, or even doing research for writing blog posts, or just discussing some question, I'll first run this exercise -- or, eventually, just be curious.

Does anyone else plan to actually carry out this exercise? How will you hold yourself to regularity?