Crazy Wisdom
Episode #477: Why Curiosity Isn’t Just a Virtue—It’s Our Oldest Technology
- Curiosity
- question-asking
- Western civilization
- culture
- Sumerian writing
- norms
- AI values
- individualism vs collectivism
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Timestamps
- 00:0005:00 Origins of question-asking, Sumerian writing, norms in early civilizations, authority and written text
- 05:0010:00 Values in AI across cultures, RLHF, tech culture in the Bay Area vs. broader American values
- 10:0015:00 Cross-cultural AI study: Taiwan vs. USA, privacy and collectivism, urban vs. rural mindset divergence
- 15:0020:00 History of curiosity in the West, from vice to virtue post-15th century, link to awe and skepticism
- 20:0025:00 Magic, alchemy, and experimentation in early science, merging maker and scholarly traditions
- 25:0030:00 Rise of public dissections, philosophy as meta-curiosity, Socratic questioning as foundational
- 30:0035:00 Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—transmission of philosophical curiosity, human uniqueness in questioning
- 35:0040:00 Language, assertion, imagination, play in animals vs. humans, symbolic worlds
- 40:0045:00 Early moderns: Montaigne, Descartes, rejection of Aristotle, rise of foundational science
- 45:0050:00 Confucianism and curiosity, tradition and authority, contrast with India and Buddhist thought
- 50:0055:00 Epistemic virtues project, training curiosity, philosophical education across cultures, spiritual curiosity
- Curiosity hasn’t always been a virtue. In Western history, especially through Christian thought until the 15th century, curiosity was viewed as a vice—something dangerous and prideful—until global exploration and scientific inquiry reframed it as essential to human understanding.
- Question-asking is culturally embedded. Different societies place varying emphasis on questioning. While Confucian cultures promote curiosity within hierarchical structures, Christian traditions historically linked it with sin—except when directed toward divine matters.
- Urbanization affects curiosity more than nationality. Machery found that whether someone lives in a city or countryside often shapes their mindset more than their cultural background. Cosmopolitan environments expose individuals to diverse values, prompting greater openness and inquiry.
- AI ethics reveals cultural alignment. In studying attitudes toward AI in the U.S. and Taiwan, expected contrasts in privacy and collectivism were smaller than anticipated. The urban, global culture in both countries seems to produce surprisingly similar ethical concerns.
- The scientific method emerged from curiosity. The fusion of the maker tradition (doing) and the scholarly tradition (knowing) in the 13th–14th centuries helped birth experimentation, public dissection, and eventually modern science—all grounded in a spirit of curiosity.
- Philosophy begins with meta-curiosity. From Socratic questioning to Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises, philosophy has always been about asking questions about questions—making “meta-curiosity” the core of the discipline.
- Only humans ask why. Machery notes that while animals can make requests, they don’t seem to ask questions. Humans alone communicate assertions and engage in symbolic, imaginative, question-driven thought, setting us apart cognitively and culturally.
Episode transcript
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcasts.
Yeah, welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Edouard Mashari and he is the Distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a director for the center for Philosophy of Science. Welcome to the show.
It's a wonderful pleasure to be here today and looking forward to our discussion.
Yeah, I got in touch with you about the role of question asking within Western civilization because I'm going to write this book eventually. It's going to take me a while to get a hold on exactly what questions do for Western civilization. And you've been studying this exact topic for a while. Maybe not this exact topic, but I know you've been going across the world and getting giving surveys to people about questions in the way that culture informs questions. Am I right to say that you probably already studied the history of question asking within civilization as well?
Your first full transcript is free. After that, an email opens every transcript in the index — a list of readers we can write to, not a guest book.