Nautilus Magazine: Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know

Curiosity is not just wanderlust, though. We’re curious about specific things, and different people are interested in different specific things. Some are hobbyists, seekers of the arcane, others jacks-of-all-trades. This divergence of interests tells us that something beyond a tendency to roam must be guiding each of our unique obsessions.

Indeed, scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up. That’s the funny thing about curiosity: It’s less about what you don’t know than about what you already do. [...]

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that life’s chief task is “subsisting at all,” followed directly by “warding off boredom, which, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall whenever it sees a life secure from need.” To be content is to be bored, and curiosity is our ticket out. The anthropologist Ralph Linton went even further. “It seems probable that the human capacity for being bored, rather than man’s social or natural needs, lies at the root of man’s cultural advance,” he wrote in 1936. Humans, in other words, have managed to amass immeasurable knowledge—language, the Taj Mahal, the Snuggie—because we loathe monotony.

But boredom alone can’t fully explain curiosity. “The very old view is that curiosity and boredom are opposite ends of the same continuum,” Loewenstein says. The new view: bored is not to curious as hungry is to full or thirsty is slaked. Rather, boredom is “a signal from your brain that you’re not making good use of a part of the brain,” like the tingling of a foot you’ve sat on too long. Boredom reminds us that we need to exercise our minds, but there are antidotes to boredom besides curiosity—food or sex, for example. What’s more, curiosity strikes even when we’re not bored. In fact, we will readily give up things we want or enjoy in order to learn something new.

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The Intercept: Fighting for Aleppo

Leila Shami, co-author of the book “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War,” told me, “The Syrian government has taken huge efforts to frame the conflict as one solely between themselves and extremist groups. People are not aware that there is a third option in Syria, that there are many Syrians from a wide range of backgrounds who are still fighting for the original goals of the revolution.” [...]

“When all this started, we were mostly too young to have any kind of ideology,” Khadr told me. “The reason we rose up was to just kill fear. To kill this fear that we had all been living under as a society.” [...]

“When protests began at Aleppo University several years ago, we held them for only 15 or 20 minutes, just to show solidarity with other cities under attack and then disperse before the security forces came for us,” he recalled. “We were not calling for Assad to fall, just to remove the emergency laws and allow some space for democracy in the country.”

When the government met those protests with brutal violence, Khadr saw sentiments harden among his fellow students. Now they realized that the government would choose force over incremental reform, and they began calling for bringing down the regime. Some spoke of taking up arms in self-defense. [...]

“Syrians have tried secularism, nationalism, Islamism, and they have all failed in various ways,” Khadr told me. “The reality is that it doesn’t matter what the orientation of the government is per se. What matters is that the ruling system respects the rights of citizens and protects them from injustice.”

Under the Assad regime, Syria had become a police state whose prisons were notorious for torture, murder, and indefinite detention. Many activists, including Ghiath Matar, known as “Syria’s Gandhi,” and the Syrian anarchist philosopher Omar Aziz, had lost their lives in Syria’s torturous detention facilities.

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The Conversation: Why is the US Green Party so irrelevant?

While Stein makes anti-establishment statements like this, her German counterparts have been advancing a green agenda in local, regional and national government for the past 30 years. Most recently, Winfried Kretschmann was reelected this year as head of government in Baden-Württemberg, one of Europe’s technologically and industrially most advanced regions.

I grew up in Germany and have taught about Germany and Europe in the United States for the past 15 years, so I have seen Green Party politicians at work in both countries. In my view, there are two reasons why the U.S. Green Party remains so marginal. Structurally, the American electoral system is heavily weighted against small political parties. But U.S. Greens also harm themselves by taking extreme positions and failing to understand that governing requires compromise – a lesson their German counterparts learned several decades ago.

Both European and North American Green Parties evolved from activist movements in the 1960s that focused on causes including environmentalism, disarmament, nuclear power, nonviolence, reproductive rights and gender equality. West German Greens formed a national political party in 1980 and gained support in local, state and federal competitions. Joschka Fischer, one of the first Greens elected to Germany’s Bundestag (parliament), served as the nation’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998-2005.

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Al Jazeera: How will the battle for Mosul affect Iraq?

The Iraqi government and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi appear determined to recapture ISIL's stronghold of Mosul. Abadi had previously said that ISIL in Iraq would be defeated by the end of 2016.

It could be a matter of time before this plan succeeds, however. ISIL is outnumbered and outgunned, but there are growing fears over the human costs of this campaign.

US-led coalition warplanes have been pounding targets in Mosul for months. They have stated that the targets were ISIL positions, but reports from inside the city suggest that civilians are also being killed. [...]

A quick flashback to 2003 reminds us that ISIL had its origins in al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi galvanised many fighters, transformed the group and introduced new insurgency tactics.

After his death in a US military raid in 2006, the group became known as the Islamic State of Iraq, led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Baghdadi was killed by Iraqi and US forces in 2010, and the group got yet another leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a former inmate held in a US prison in southern Iraq in 2004 and set free four years later.

He ultimately led the group to fight in Syria's war in 2012 and formed what is the present-day ISIL. Many Iraqis argue that the main reason that such groups exist is the injustice inflicted on Iraq's Sunni Arabs since 2003.

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Alternet: Sex, Lies and Videotape: Californians Will Vote On Whether to Require Porn Actors to Use Condoms—Why?

Prop 60 assumes that the state of California and its residents know better than the adult film actors themselves. And so, if passed, the ballot initiative would require male porn actors to wear condoms. Furthermore, the proposition would allow residents to act as condom patrols, reporting actors who attempt to sneak unsheathed past this new layer of censorship. To that point, if a non-condom user was discovered in a porn video after the passage of the initiative, and the Cal/OSHA bureaucracy failed to take action, any consumer could file a civil suit and claim part of the revenues from the video.

This is ludicrous on so many levels and, even for left-leaning groups, the nanny-state overreach on this proposition is oppressive. Opponents of the proposition — including the DCCC, the California Democratic Party, the California Republican Party, the California Libertarian Party, various local Democratic and Republican organizations, San Francisco Berniecrats, the Free Speech Coalition, the AIDS Project Los Angeles, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Adult Performer Actors Guild and dozens of others — agree that the law is not only too restrictive, it’d end up becoming a frivolous “lawsuit bonanza.” [...]

Stoya added, “I believe that pornography as entertainment serves a widespread human need as a safe place to fantasize.” Of course that’s exactly right. As long as performers are aware of what they’re doing, and as long as no one is hurt in the process, there’s no point in non-experts telling the experts how to make their movies, nor is it appropriate to meddle with the cinematic fantasies they’re manufacturing — even if you don’t believe porn is an art form or a genre of filmmaking. (It’s a little of both.) No one knows better than the actors who make these movies whether they’re at risk, and holding up the threat of lawsuits against each performer for not wearing condoms seems like an overly punitive measure for a problem that simply doesn’t exist.

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Quartz: Scientists explain how happiness makes us less creative

But most scientists say that creativity calls on persistence and problem-solving skills, not positivity. Computational scientist Anna Jordanous at Kent University and linguist Bill Keller of Sussex University in England dug through through over half century of study on the creative process in various fields, and isolated 14 components of creativity. Happiness wasn’t one of them.

Creativity is complex. The 14 components Jordanous and Keller found all need to work together to varying degrees depending on the task at hand, the researchers explain. None is more important than any other although different creative activities—and different steps of a single creative effort—may demand more of one or another and build on each other.

Mark Davis, a psychologist at the University of North Texas Department of Management divides creativity into two phases; initial idea generation and subsequent problem-solving. His review of research on feelings and creativity concluded that a positive mood is useful when first brainstorming, processing information, and coming up with as many ideas as possible—you don’t want to bring judgment into that, because it could stifle idea generation.

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Independent: China wants to give all of its citizens a score – and their rating could affect every area of their lives

Imagine a world where an authoritarian government monitors everything you do, amasses huge amounts of data on almost every interaction you make, and awards you a single score that measures how “trustworthy” you are.

In this world, anything from defaulting on a loan to criticising the ruling party, from running a red light to failing to care for your parents properly, could cause you to lose points. And in this world, your score becomes the ultimate truth of who you are – determining whether you can borrow money, get your children into the best schools or travel abroad; whether you get a room in a fancy hotel, a seat in a top restaurant – or even just get a date.

This is not the dystopian superstate of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, in which all-knowing police stop crime before it happens. But it could be China by 2020. It is the scenario contained in China's ambitious plans to develop a far-reaching social credit system, a plan that the Communist Party hopes will build a culture of “sincerity” and a “harmonious socialist society” where “keeping trust is glorious.”

A high-level policy document released in September listed the sanctions that could be imposed on any person or company deemed to have fallen short. The overriding principle: “If trust is broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere.” A whole range of privileges would be denied, while people and companies breaking social trust would also be subject to expanded daily supervision and random inspections.

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BBC News: EU Brexit: Poland feels the chill ahead of UK talks

Modern Poland is a place of sharply polarised politics in which a broad coalition of liberal opposition parties fear their country is in the grip of a government so deeply conservative that it is exerting a kind of reactionary grip on political life.

"People who support one side really don't speak to people who support the other," one old friend told me in Warsaw. "I don't even remember that in the communist days."

One thing that does more or less seem to unite Poland's fractious political class, though, is a profound belief in the value of the EU. [...]

In all the countries that joined the EU after emerging from the shadows of Soviet communism there is a deeper and more complex dimension to the argument about free movement of labour, which is perhaps difficult for British voters and politicians to grasp.

Anyone who's over 50 in Poland - and all of their children - will remember the petty humiliations of Soviet occupation and, in particular, the enormous difficulties of arranging foreign travel even with the communist bloc.

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