Non-curiosity Cures False Precision

Curiosity can either open up new worlds or seek a misleading false precision.

Why did I choose the “Special BBQ Plate” yesterday for dinner at the local BBQ joint? Why does my wife prefer one actress to another?
What is my teenager doing in her room with the door shut?

I don’t want to know. In fact, I have a practice I call “non-curiosity”, where I’ve developed the capability to recognize when I’m feeling curious about something that is better released into unknowing.

At the same time, I value curiosity a lot.

• How do I cook a better steak?

• What movie would my wife like to see?

• What did my teenager do today?

These seem like almost the same questions. What differentiates them? Why does curiosity seem valuable to me in the latter case, but possibly harmful in the latter?

Why did I choose the “Special BBQ Plate” yesterday for dinner at the local BBQ joint? To answer this question is to create a simplified, and surely false, model of myself. The only reasonable answer is “because I did”. Curiosity here is a call for false precision, to act as if the gears of my desires are known.

Why does my wife prefer one actress to another? This is another call for false precision, in this case with respect to the interiority of someone else.

What is my teenager doing in her room with the door shut? Here, successfully following my curiosity would violate her reasonable privacy expectations. People sometimes want to do things in private. They don’t want to be exposed to others’ evaluation of their activities. Seems like a reasonable implicit request, which I am happy to grant.

Note, that the practice of non-curiosity is not merely suppressing curiosity but releasing it entirely. You can’t hide what you feel, and someone who is curious but suppressing it has a different feel in relational interactions than someone who is not curious.

How do I cook a better steak? Here, a gears-level understanding is possible. I can cook a better steak by understanding how to more skillfully use heat and moisture.

What movie would my wife like to see? Here, I am finding out about my wife’s exteriority, instead of interiority, and so I am not constructing a falsely precise black box of her tastes.

What did my teenager do today? In conjunction with intentional lacunae of non-curiosity where she wants privacy, there is much to learn and enjoy here: freely offered information vs. aggressive probing without consent.

Curiosity is a virtue, but so is non-curiosity, each in the appropriate context.