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Wei_Dai comments on Joy in Discovery - Less Wrong
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I would guess that most people who feel this high haven't really solved a major mystery, but just think that they did, because for every person who truly solves a big mystery, there are many others who erroneously think that they did. For me, whenever I think I may have solved some problem, I'm always worried that I have made a mistake in my reasoning somewhere, and it takes days to years to convince myself that I was right after all, so I never really get that big momentary high. (One exception is when I'm doing crypto optimization, where I can easily verify the correctness of some idea just by benchmarking the resulting code.)
I think I'm motivated to work on a problem mostly because I want to get rid of a feeling of confusion, and I'd be happy to let others do the work for me and just learn from textbooks. So I'm quite alarmed at Eliezer's suggestion that in the future, knowledge should be hidden from people to make their life more fun.
When I was in primary school (year 5 or 6) I struck upon the idea that humans could have variable perceptions. My friend, Charlie, had colour blindness, I did not know what this meant and assumed after a cursory explanation that he mistook red for green and green for red. Being a relatively inquisitive kid I struck upon a problem immediately and could not work out how he'd ever know he was colour blind.
It wasn't until later that day I was informed as to how colour blindness works. Still, I felt incredibly clever for several years until I was informed that the problem had been thought of before, I thought I had encountered a true wonder of the human mind for the first time and to me it was a pretty big high especially considering my age.