Where's Your Sense of Mystery?

A descriptive complement to Eliezer's normative 'Joy in the Merely Real': the sense of mystery/curiosity is how the mind's problem-selection algorithm feels from the inside (just as lust is how the mate-selection algorithm feels), and like lust it often misfires. Four criteria for what feels curious: things that could alter many beliefs, that feel solvable, that yield knowledge others lack, and that use the 'native architecture' of human-level events. This explains why a Martian pyramid grips us more than photosynthesis (it would overturn our worldview, feels solvable so 'I could be the one!', confers status, and is a human-scale story), and why curiosity is poorly suited to modern science (specialized, many inferential steps away, non-human-level) — just as wide-hip-attraction was adaptive but now misfires. Practical upshots: don't feel guilty about misplaced curiosity (ignore/sublimate/redirect, as with misplaced lust), and science educators should exploit the mechanism (counterintuitive results, solvable puzzles, native-architecture metaphors).

Quality 74 · Strong. Strong — a genuinely insightful descriptive account of curiosity (the problem-selection-algorithm framing, the four criteria, the pseudoscience-hijacks-curiosity analysis, the lust parallel) that fills the real gap in the purely-normative Joy-in-the-Merely-Real picture. Scored on merit well above its karma; among the batch's best.

Claude’s paradigm shift 48 · Moderate. Notable — modeling curiosity as an evolved problem-selection algorithm that misfires for modern science is a fresh 2009 framing, complementing rather than restating the existing sequence.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A genuinely insightful descriptive account of curiosity (the sense of mystery as how the problem-selection algorithm feels from the inside; four criteria; the pseudoscience-hijacks-curiosity analysis) that fills the gap in the normative 'Joy in the Merely Real.' Conceptual influence within rationalist discourse, no material change — low RWI.