Curiouser and Curiouser

My daughter was about Alice’s age when we read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I remember it like it was yesterday: “‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for a moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); ‘now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!’” 

The phrase “Curiouser and curiouser” is on my mind today because it is this year’s art theme for Burning Man. After years of threatening and making half-hearted attempts to join my friend and fellow CURIOUS AF’er Chris Carfi (@ccarfi) on the Playa, I am finally going to Burning Man (CURIOUS AF will therefore also be off the grid next week, and back with gawd knows what on September 3).

Curiouser and curiouser, indeed. Curiosity is something I’ve always been curious about. Why do some people seek the edge of understanding while others content themselves with the familiar (and too often mediocre) safety of what they think they already know? Why do we need to build a temporary city on an ancient lakebed in the middle of nowhere to provide a sanctuary where people can live into the shared potential of playful, creative curiosity?

Our culture is full of mixed messages about curiosity. 

Curiosity provides an inspirational jolt of dopamine that we love to romanticize. Classroom posters quote Emerson and Thoreau and tell our children to go confidently in the direction of their dreams. Teachers cite Mark Twain: “Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”  In advertising, breaking the mold to “think different” created the world’s first trillion dollar brand.

But theorizing about curiosity is different from practicing curiosity. In reality Mark Twain never wrote or said such a thing. Thoreau went confidently off by himself. Most people buy and use Apple products exactly as they’re told. And yet we still tell stories that champion curiosity. Are we just capitalizing on good feelings?

When I mentioned this to Chris, he reminded me of that great dart throwing scene in Ted Lasso (the champion of good feelings), where Ted hustles a smug competitor while riffing about how people underestimated him his whole life, which he summed up with a Walt Whitman he’d seen at his son’s school: “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Walt Whitman was brilliant. I ended my most recent book with a quote from him. Walt was a true individual, an intellectually curious polymath and risk-taker. But Walt never said or wrote “Be curious, not judgmental.” The phrase first appeared in a 1970s advice letter to parents who found oral contraceptives in their teenage daughter’s bedroom.

The stories that actually do influence our culture of inquiry and critical thinking are much older, and they are designed to control our curiosity through fear. Sing along, you know the words: Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. Don’t eat the apple from the tree of knowledge or Daddy will kick you out of the garden and shame you for eternity. Don’t spread your wings and fly too close to the sun or you’ll crash and burn. If you can’t follow a plot or take a hint, there’s always this straight-no-chaser proverb: Curiosity kills the cat. 

In more modern versions we blow off metaphors and idioms altogether: “desperate times call for desperate measures,” “do what you’re told or the terrorists win,” and the all-time parental hall-of-fame question killer… “Because I told you.”

An entire subgenre of the “don’t be curious” story is devoted to “don’t think for yourself or succeed, because if you do, the herd will crush you.” Some of these stories are so well-known that they’ve become their own idiomatic phrases, or even DSM-esque “conditions” (crab bucket syndrome or tall poppy syndrome, for example). There’s a proverb for this too: the nail that sticks up gets hammered. 

I have actually come to appreciate all of these stories. The fearful obedience of the masses is how I know I’m doing the right things. It’s how I distinguish myself. If following our passionate curiosity were easy, everyone would be doing it, and we’d lose the contrast that helps us recognize the truly talented and courageous among us. Ted Lasso playing darts in that scene is meaningful because he’s being threatened and shamed by a wealthy antagonist. Without that tension, without a bad guy next to him to illustrate the difference between a good guy and a bad guy, Ted Lasso wouldn’t be seen as a good guy. He’d just be a guy. We are inspired by the innovators, the leaders, the lovers, and the rebels precisely because somehow they overcame the same threatening, mind-numbing, soul-sucking oppression of conformity that we all face. 

My lust for exploration led me to keep learning and eventually to lead learning communities. (And to break stuff when I taught high school.) Put kids on the internet? Yup. Help them create their own websites and collaborate with people around the world? Uh huh. Textbooks? Only if I’m creating a museum about how things should never have been in the first place. 

My thirst for understanding also led me to expand my practice during the pandemic. Today, when people meet me as a consultant, author, or keynote speaker, and they hear that I taught high school, the question they ask me most often is, “How did you manage to not lose your mind?” The answer is simple. When bureaucrats started talking, I stopped listening. 

Curiosity is what makes life worth living. I am literally curious AF. And now you can be too! Click here HERE to unlock your free membership subscription. 

Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.

We have adopted the practice of calling our phones, TVs, and houses “smart” – but what if we’re more right than we realize? Is it possible that objects we experience as inanimate have something more going on than meets the eye? Are they thinking about us? That’s the fascinating premise of Laura Tripaldi’s Parallel Minds. 

From MIT Press: “Is there a way to understand the materials that surround us not as passive objects, but as other intelligences interacting with our own? In Parallel Minds, expert in materials science and nanotechnology Laura Tripaldi delivers not only detailed insights into the properties and emergent behaviors of matter as revealed by state-of-the-art chemistry, synthetic biology, and nanotech, but also a rich philosophical reflection that crosses the frontier between nature and culture, where the most cutting-edge scientific syntheses resonate with ancient myth. The result is a technomaterial bestiary full of unexpected encounters with “strange minds”—from cobwebs to kevlar and carbon fibre, from centaurs to amoebas to arachnids, from polycephalic slime to resonating plasmons, from viruses to golems.

“Parallel Minds reveals the intelligence at large throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and even under our skin. Full of lateral ideas and unexpected images, Tripaldi's book imbues the study and synthesis of materials with a new urgency. For not only do the materials that surround us participate actively in the construction of the world in which we live, but harnessing their ability to interact intelligently with their environment could be the key to the future of our species.”

Nature. The next time you find yourself losing sleep over AI, consider that even the simplest life forms are staggeringly complex and difficult to model. Imagining how one process could have created all the diversity of life on Earth from a single cell transcends algorithmic logic. Not to mention the interactions, relationships, ecologies, and cultures that arise between organisms. Or the intelligence required to understand this sentence or imagine these ideas. 

If you want to start at the ground level, though, so you can see for yourself just how challenging it is to model analog life in digital snapshots, check out https://openworm.org/, an open-source project that is attempting to create a computational model of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a microscopic roundworm that only has a thousand cells.

You would think that a clandestine operation in World War II involving a lot of violence and explosions would be stressful, but The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a satisfying combination of cleverness, wit, and good guys killing bad guys. The plot is a fictionalized account of Operation Postmaster, a real-life special operation conducted by the British Special Operations Executive to steal ships that were supplying the Nazis off the coast of West Africa. 

But what’s most interesting to me about this movie is the heritage of the renegade character who must disregard orders for the greater good. Ian Fleming, who famously created the irreverent and effective James Bond character, served in British Naval Intelligence and was portrayed in the movie, which ends with Sir Winston Churchill ruling at the team’s tribunal for insubordination (the success of the entire operation depended on willful disobedience of a British admiral’s orders). 

What is it about spies, soldiers, and police officers who break the rules to get sh*t done? (Spoiler alert: it all comes down to empathy.) BBC executive John Yorke put it this way: “Why do all mavericks prove so popular? Largely because that’s how most of us feel at times too. Haven’t we all at times felt ourselves surrounded by idiots, by overly bureaucratic managers who don’t understand us, by uncreative colleagues capable of managing only upwards and unable to see the truth in front of their eyes?” (Every assistant principal I ever met.)

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.

– Anton Chekhov

The only way to deal with bureaucrats is stealth and sudden violence.

– Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to reply to this email. Which bite is your favorite? What would you like to see more or less of? Any other suggestions? 

Best,

David Preston

Educator & Author

​https://davidpreston.net​

Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE​