This year, for Halloween, I’m wearing normal clothes. Somebody asked me, “What are you supposed to be?” I said, “I’m a former gifted child. I was supposed to be a lot of things.”
The horror!
💬 “Are you curious about your world? If so, what does your curiosity look like? How does it feel, and how does it move? And could you expand your repertoire of curiosity? In other words, could you practise curiousity differently?” - Busybody, hunter, dancer - which is your curiosity style?
Busybody, hunter, dancer - which is your curiosity style?
Are you curious about your world? If so, what does your curiosity look like? How does it feel, and how does it move? And could you expand your repertoire of curiosity?
In other words, could you practise curiousity differently?
Here’s political philosopher Perry Zurn on three kinesthetic modes of curiosity, the busybody, the hunter, and the dancer:
“If the busybody breaches the social world in order to collect novel bits of information, and if the hunter focuses intently on one piece of information that exceeds the knowledge network and yet already has social significance, the dancer may rupture knowledge and social networks by either jumping to a new idea or throwing existing ideas into a new frame. Driven neither by secrets nor by necessity, the dancer is an experimenter, breaking with traditional pathways of investigation. Their ideational sphere is characterized by discontinuity, the creation of new concepts, and by radically remodeling knowledge networks.” (Zurn 2019:40)
The first two modes, busybody and hunter, stem from time-honoured, traditional understandings of curiosity, which come from the classical Greeks and Romans onwards. The third mode, the dancer, is informed by the philosopher Nietzsche’s focus on dance as an analogy for the creative imagination.
For Nietzsche, life’s ultimate question was: ‘Does it dance?'
I’m intrigued by Zurn’s project of exploring the social and political implications of curiosity. It seems obvious that authoritarian regimes would discourage a curious public, but the connections between curiosity, creative freedom, and politics have hardly been examined in a rigorous manner.
Having read about Zurn et al.’s 2024 research on how Wikipedia users create and navigate knowledge networks, I’d now like to read Zurn’s book, 📚Curious Minds. The Power of Connection. This was co-written by Zurn’s identical twin, Dani S. Bassett.
Meanwhile, here’s a 🎙️podcast discussion about Zurn’s previous book, 📚Curiosity and Power. The Politics of Inquiry.
And my fall down this particular rabbit hole has led further down, to Lynn Borton’s excellent and encyclopedic podcast/radio show, 🎙️Choose to be Curious. OK, that’s my listening sorted for a little while.
I’m interested in all this, partly because I identify quite strongly with this ‘dancer’ mode of curiosity - making and pursuing links across otherwise disconnected fields.
Perhaps you might also find this perspective illuminating or useful.
And further, the typology of busybody, hunter and dancer also seems to have something to contribute to my understanding and practices of making notes. ‘Radically remodeling knowledge networks’, as Zurm puts it, is something I’m very interested in.
So if you too write notes, you might also get something of value from this discussion.
Curiosity: it might not be fatal
Three styles of curiosity - so which one is yours?
I’m interested in what it means to be curious. So I was intrigued by a new study about curiosity that I found via The Conversation.
The study examined the different ways nearly half a million Wikipedia users read their way through its massive network of articles. It turns out these can be characterised as three different styles of curiosity.
The authors write:
“By measuring the structure of knowledge networks constructed by readers weaving a thread through articles in Wikipedia, we replicate two styles of curiosity previously identified in laboratory studies: the nomadic “busybody” and the targeted “hunter.” Further, we find evidence for another style—the “dancer””.
And what are these different styles? In very brief summary:
“The busybody scouts for loose threads of novelty, the hunter pursues specific answers in a projectile path, and the dancer leaps in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge.”
I immediately identified with the ‘dancer’ style, though as the researchers' work reflects, it depends on the kind of information I’m looking for. Going deeper, I found the analysis of knowledge networks really interesting.
And the description of the ‘dancer’ style certainly resonated with what I’ve learned about note-making according to the Zettelkasten approach:
“This type of curiosity is described as a dance in which disparate concepts, typically conceived of as unrelated, are briefly linked in unique ways as the curious individual leaps and bounds across traditionally siloed areas of knowledge. Such brief linking fosters the generation or creation of new experiences, ideas, and thoughts.”
There’s a lot more to unpack from this article, and I’m going to be thinking about it for a while. For example, is there really a ‘goldilocks’ setting for curiosity - just enough to be useful, not so much as to overwhelm? I guess there must be, but I don’t know how you’d find it. For me the goldilocks setting isn’t to expand or else rein in my curiosity, but rather to find tools and especially techniques to enable me to make the most of my curiosity.
References:
Dale Zhou et al., Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership.Sci. Adv.10,eadn3268(2024).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adn3268
Image: Giordano Dance Chicago. Wikimedia, [Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International](Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International).
Why not make notes by hand?
It’s often said that making notes by hand is good for learning. Here’s 🎬Notes on Biology, a nice stop-motion short about the benefits of doodling in class.1
There’s plenty of academic research on ‘the clear benefits of handwriting’:
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Flanigan, A. E., Wheeler, J., Colliot, T., Lu, J., & Kiewra, K. A. (2024). Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(3), 78. <doi.org/10.1007/s…>
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Ose Askvik, E., Van Der Weel, F. R. (Ruud), & Van Der Meer, A. L. H. (2020). The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1810. <doi.org/10.3389/f…>
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Van Der Weel, F. R. (Ruud), & Van Der Meer, A. L. H. (2024). Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: A high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1219945. <doi.org/10.3389/f…>
But for a slightly different perspective, one that appreciates drawing, see:
- Richardson, L., & Lacroix, G. (2023). Which modality results in superior recall for students: Handwriting, typing, or drawing? Journal of Writing Research, 15(3), 519–540. <doi.org/10.17239/…>
Now read: Three worthwhile modes of note-making.
Don’t miss another post (because that would be tragic).
Put your email address here and I’ll write to you slowly. I mean weekly:
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and it only took me 13 years to find this! ↩︎
So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies
While clearing out my desk recently I found a USB thumb drive with a whole heap of old note-taking apps on it. This drive dates from 2017, not even seven years ago, but it seems like ancient history.
These note-taking apps come and go and the only ones worthwhile IMHO are the ones with a format you can keep using, or at least access. Several, I’m happy to say, had easily re-usable plain text files in a ‘data’ folder or similar.
So why am I mentioning this?
The truth according to Trump
Alan Jacobs rightly observes that Trump supporters don’t care about the ‘truth’ of their claims.
He’s spot on to point out that the purpose of the constant barrage of egregious lying is to mock the idea that truth matters, and to gather a constituency of people who are in on the joke.
And certainly, there’s no point trying to correct these outlandish claims, as though their pushers ever cared a fig about the facts of the matter. They don’t.
💬Manuel says:
“people are slowly starting to realise that you can get immense human value from the web outside of traditional social media. You have to work for it but it’s absolutely worth it.”
That’s true. Facebook still has huge numbers, but you don’t need a theoretically mighty reach to connect meaningfully with the right people.
💬 “Doing and seeing and thinking about stuff. Writing things down. Sharing and talking about little things, simple ideas, tiny thoughts. Making and tweaking and adjusting and imagining. Changing and creating. Thinking and sharing. Finding and connecting. Connecting and imagining. Imagining and thinking and finding and sharing and writing and asking and answering and connecting and building and tweaking and trying and adjusting and creating and changing things.
One little tiny itty-bitty thing at a time.” - Annie Mueller
Yuri says social media platforms have killed links. If so, it’s a very bad thing. I wouldn’t know, because I’m all in on the Web. The Web is the social platform. Without links, I’m out. Hyperlinks are such a fundamentally great innovation that any platform that tries to avoid them will lose.
How to write an article from your notes - an example
In July 2024 educational technologist Andy Matuschak published a long article outlining his observations on the debate over discovery learning versus instructional learning, and how it relates to the Holy Grail of educational technology: “a wildly powerful learning environment”.
Exorcising us of the Primer is a great article, but it’s just as interesting to see how this piece of writing came into existence in the first place.
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It’s not that systems for getting things done are bad, exactly. It’s just that they’re not the main point. The main point – though it took me years to realise it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine. If you don’t prioritise the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.
The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Here’s my perspective on ‘atomic notes’.
They’re atomic in time even before they’re atomic in any other dimension.
An atomic note, for me, is the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
I got this from computer game designers, who call the shortest viable unit of play an ‘atom’. A single life in Space Invaders (and yes, that shows my age). Just enough to make you desperate to keep going.
Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes
I’ve lost track of the ridiculous number of ‘Zettelkasten apps’ now on the loose on the wild wild web. When I checked the ChatGPT marketplace, for example, I had to stop counting at 50. I was losing the will to go on looking at them.
Everyone makes the apps, it seems, but who’s left to use them?
If you’re one of those sensible people who just want to make useful notes, plain text files with Markdown are simple, elegant, versatile and durable.
Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto 📚. Ok, I finished it a while ago, and here’s my enthusiastic review
Finished reading: The Looking-Glass by Machado De Assis 📚 My favourite late 19th century Brazilian author. His novella ‘The Alienist’, included in this collection, is hilarious. The style and tone strongly reminds me of my favourite contemporary Argentinian author, César Aira.
How to get Strata for micro.blog up and running
I’ve decided to make use of the ‘notes’ feature in micro.blog.
This is like making private posts in a blog. But my main use case is brainstorming future blog posts. I want to take notes of half-formed ideas, which may or may not end up as blog posts. They’re not quite draft quality, but I have a hunch they’ll end up as public posts, not just remain as private notes.
The Notes feature is very easy to use. You make notes from the main page by clicking on the ‘Notes’ menu item.
And you can set up multiple ‘notebooks’, which you can rename at will.
But there’s also an iOS app called Strata to make the experience easy and fun. That’s what I wanted to try.
📷 Kookaburra of the day
I know nothing about breakdancing 🤣 but back in October I attended the qualifying event for the Australian breakdancing Olympic team, where I saw Raygun win. So… AMA
