Comment author: Henry_V 04 September 2007 11:36:47AM 1 point [-]

I love this: "studies show we communicate much more ambiguously than we think we do." :D

I also agree with this: "reawaken the delight in a world full of mysteries, which has been sapped by the notion that they are already understood, and therefore, no longer important."

But, I would add that there are mysteries that are understood, and mysteries that are not understood. So, if I'm going to spend my time discovering answers to mysteries, I'm going to choose the less-understood variety, so that I can get published, or the well-understood ones that are practical at the time (how does this #$%! toilet work again?). I, also, have limited time during any given day.

(That doesn't stop me from spending the odd day trying to re-discover why the units for joules should be able to be expressed as distance-squared-mass units; I'm not a physicist.)

Comment author: Henry_V 04 September 2007 03:14:27AM 3 points [-]

I completely disagree with your portrayal of curiosity and curiosity-stoppers. Our curiosity generally has to do with our familiarity (or lack of it!) when encountering a phenomenon.

If I saw you cast a bizarre light that hovered over your book on the train, "Science!" would surely NOT diminish my curiosity, b/c I'd never seen anything like it ever. When I see David Blain (sp?) perform, I am amazed (and curious) about how he does "street magic." Do I think it's magic? Of course not. In fact, I presume that there is a rational scientific explanation to it. But, that does not make me less curious. In fact, I'm curious to know the explanation.

Conversely, when I walk into someone else's house and they flip on a light, I do not stop to be sure that their lights work the same as mine (even though I have no experience with their lights), because the phenomenon is not new to me. I've been a good Bayesian and simply applied my experience with thousands of light switches to this new light switch.

Curiosity is a function of (1) our familiarity with the phenomenon, and (2) the intensity (or magnitude) of the phenomenon (is that a little flame coming from your fingertips or a 100' flare?). It has little to do with Science! or Magic! as curiosity-stoppers.

Comment author: Henry_V 27 August 2007 11:28:05AM 2 points [-]

I'm pretty ignorant on this, but I always thought that the phrase related to complex outcomes that result from surprisingly simple systems, so that the complexity is "emergent".

One example is chaos. One can have chaotic non-linear dynamic systems and non-chaotic non-linear dynamic systems.

But, again, I could have misunderstood.

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