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The Meditation on Curiosity — LessWrong

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Consider what happens to you, on a psychological level, if you begin by saying: “It is my duty to criticize my own beliefs.” Roger Zelazny once distinguished between “wanting to be an author” versus “wanting to write.” Mark Twain said: “A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read.” Criticizing yourself from a sense of duty leaves you wanting to have investigated, so that you’ll be able to say afterward that your faith is not blind. This is not the same as wanting to investigate. This can lead to motivated stopping of your investigation.  You consider an objection, then a counterargument to that objection, then you stop there.  You repeat this with several objections, until you feel that you have done your duty to investigate, and then you stop there. You have achieved your underlying psychological objective: to get rid of the cognitive dissonance that would result from thinking of yourself as a rationalist, and yet knowing that you had not tried to

x The Meditation on Curiosity — LessWrong Thinking Better on Purpose Curiosity Litany of Tarski Frontpage 223 The Meditation on Curiosity by Eliezer Yudkowsky 6th Oct 2007 5 min read 102 223 The first virtue is curiosity. —“ The Twelve Virtues of Rationality ” As rationalists, we are obligated to criticize ourselves and question our beliefs . . . are we not? Consider what happens to you, on a psychological level, if you begin by saying: “It is my duty to criticize my own beliefs.” Roger Zelazny once distinguished between “wanting to be an author” versus “wanting to write.” Mark Twain said: “A

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