Curiosity is usually described as a trait, like being tall or punctual. Some people have it; others don’t. It is a slightly discouraging way to think about it, and I am not convinced it is accurate.
In practice, curiosity looks less like a personality and more like a handful of habits. Habits can be practised.
Ask how, not just what
Knowing that something works is useful. Knowing how it works is what lets you fix it, change it or build the next one.
Bike fit is a good example. You can know that a bike feels right without knowing why. The why involves a surprising amount: the relationship between a frame’s geometry and the body on top of it, the two numbers (stack and reach) that describe where a frame puts your hands, the way flexibility and riding style shift the answer. Following that “how” through its layers is more or less what RidePrecision is about.
The same question works on almost anything: a market, a habit, an organisation, a piece of music. Why does this work, and what would happen if one part of it changed?
Follow the tangent, for a while
Some of the most useful connections sit one step outside the problem you are working on. A question about cycling leads to biomechanics; biomechanics leads to measurement; measurement leads to software. A question about AI agents leads to simulation, then to societies, then to how groups make decisions. The map of ideas on this site is partly a record of tangents like these.
The discipline is in the “for a while”. A tangent is valuable when you bring something back from it. Without that, curiosity becomes a pleasant way of never finishing anything, which I can recommend only in moderation.
Surprise is information
Surprise is an underrated signal. It means your model of the world was wrong in a specific and interesting way. A number that doesn’t match expectations, a user who does something nobody anticipated, a simulation that produces behaviour no one designed: each is a small invitation to update what you believe.
Surprise is the sound of a mental model breaking. It is worth stopping for.
It is also easy to ignore. Under time pressure, a surprising result looks like noise, or an error to be explained away. Curiosity in this sense is partly a matter of slack: leaving enough room in a day, a project or a plan to notice when something doesn’t fit. Some kinds of noticing come more easily away from a screen altogether, on a long ride, a forest trail or an afternoon with a book.
Can curiosity be built?
The Living Atlas is, among other things, an attempt to take that question seriously. It is a concept for an autonomous research agent that follows emerging developments, notices signals, connects distant fields and keeps asking the next question, maintaining a map of knowledge that changes over time.
Whether that counts as curiosity is debatable. An agent can follow leads tirelessly, but deciding which questions matter is much harder to delegate. The more modest ambition is the one I find most interesting: a system that helps people come across things they did not know they should be interested in. A good bookshop does that. So does a good conversation, or a walk without a destination.
Curiosity sits between analytical and creative thinking and feeds both. Analysis needs good questions to answer. Creativity needs material to recombine. Curiosity supplies the questions and collects the material.
The everyday version of it is not very glamorous: paying attention, asking one more question than is strictly necessary, and being comfortable saying “I don’t know yet”. The last part is harder than it sounds, and probably the most useful.