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Curiosity's Moral Shift In Early Modern Thought
- Early modern thinkers ambivalently recast curiosity from a Christian vice into a scientific appetite for causes, yet warned about vanity-driven inquiry.
- Hobbes calls curiosity an appetite for causes; Bacon praises usefulness but fears curiosity for vanity rather than human advancement.
Curiosity As Building Connections
- Perry Zurn reframes curiosity from an individual desire to know into a social practice of building connections between ideas, people, and past thinkers.
- Curious activity constructs dynamic knowledge scaffolds rather than single facts, enabling rearrangement of existing networks of knowledge when new info arrives.
Network Science Models Curiosity
- Dani S. Bassett maps curiosity onto network science to quantify different architectures of how people connect ideas.
- Using marshmallows and toothpicks as an analogy, network science describes distinct connective structures people build when they seek information.