RenaSciQuestion network · The Renaissance of Science E4For Curiosity

E4CuriosityFurther topic

For Curiosity

The Play Spirit of Science

?In the age of AI, can research still be fun?

Topic page
~1,306 words · 8 screens
Deep read
~6,190 words · 62 sources
Questions
15 out · 18 in
Start with the first question ↓Go straight to the deep read ↗
  1. 01Why do scientists do science?
  2. 02Where does the desire to know begin?
  3. 03Does the urge to win taint science?
  4. 04Why should anyone do useless research?
  5. 05Where has the fun gone?
  6. 06Will AI take away the fun?
  7. 07Can research be designed like a game?
  8. 08Isn’t calling science a game a bit frivolous?

◇The network re-centres on “For Curiosity”. Every screen leaves a few follow-up questions; open one to walk into another topic.

01/08Joy

Why do scientists do science?

The prize is the pleasure of finding out

In a 1981 documentary, Richard Feynman said he didn’t really understand the Nobel Prize: the real prize was the pleasure of finding things out, and seeing other people use what you had found. The work that later won him the prize began in the student cafeteria at Cornell. Someone tossed a plate into the air, and just for fun he worked out how its wobble was related to its spin.

Delight is not a decoration on science, nor merely its fuel: science is itself a way of playing. But there is no need to follow Feynman in making light of honour. “The observation that other people use it” is itself an honour; curiosity and the will to win have always gone together.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhy do scientists do science?↘
Asked from elsewhereE3Curtain up

02/08Wonder

Where does the desire to know begin?

Wonder, leisure and debate

Aristotle said that all human beings by nature desire to know, and that it is wonder that first sets people philosophizing; mathematics arose first in Egypt because the priests there had leisure. The Greek word for “leisure” later became “school”. One more condition, often left out, has to be added: the Greeks’ distinctive tradition of free debate. Wonder, leisure and debate happen to be precisely the marks of play — recreation and contest, driven by intrinsic delight.

Confucius said: “Those who know it are not the equal of those who love it; those who love it are not the equal of those who delight in it.” In his Heavenly Questions, Qu Yuan asked more than a hundred questions about heaven and earth in a single breath. The ancient Chinese knew this delight too, but they took a different road: the Hundred Schools argued mainly about how to secure and govern the state, and the yardstick of learning was whether it served in “settling disputes and benefiting ordinary people”. That road missed a good deal, but it was not the wrong one.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhere does the desire to know begin?↘
Asked from elsewhereMOriginE1Lectern

A philosopher holding a celestial globe. Oil painting, c. 1620s. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

03/08Agon

Does the urge to win taint science?

Knowledge was always a contest

Johan Huizinga found that culture is born in play. For the Greeks, debate, war and athletic games were all ways of competing for honour. First came an atmosphere of debate, then philosophy; first the fame-hungry Sophists, then philosophers like Socrates. To contend in earnest over useless things, in pursuit of immortality: that was the Greek spirit.

In 1535 Tartaglia and Fior agreed to set each other thirty problems, and Tartaglia is said to have solved all of his rival’s in under two hours. In 1696 Johann Bernoulli challenged the whole of Europe to find the curve of fastest descent; Newton solved it in a single night, and Bernoulli supposedly said that you can tell the lion by its claw. Racing to be first is the very nature of a contest; the dark side lies not in competing but in breaking faith. Rather than picture scientists as aloof old men above the fray, think of them as big boys, curious and combative.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperDoes the urge to win taint science?↘
Asked from elsewhereMOriginE1LettersE7Motive

An écorché figure striding forward with a discus. Engraving. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

04/08Useless

Why should anyone do useless research?

Usefulness is a gift, not the price of admission

Augustine counted curiosity as “the lust of the eyes”: watching a lizard catch flies, he would forget what he ought to be doing. Only in the early modern period was curiosity vindicated, as nobles and scholars built cabinets of curiosities that set crocodiles, shells, minerals and machines side by side. Henri Poincaré said that the scientist studies nature not because it is useful but because he takes pleasure in it — because nature is beautiful.

G. H. Hardy took pride in the uselessness of number theory; it later became the cryptographic foundation of online payment. Bacteria from Yellowstone’s hot springs made today’s gene amplification possible. But defending curiosity on the grounds that it “turned out useful later” is hindsight: in their infancy these pursuits looked more like idle distractions, and such a defence cannot rescue a single piece of research that is not yet of any use. Nor does utility necessarily mean self-interest: science done to improve people’s lives is just as noble. Different ways have different virtues.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperHow was curiosity vindicated?↘
Asked from elsewhereMCuriosityE5Lab

Ole Worm’s museum in Copenhagen. Engraving, 1655. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

05/08Squeeze

Where has the fun gone?

The fun is being squeezed out

In one round of Australia’s national medical research funding, researchers spent some 550 years of working time writing applications, and only 21% were funded. In the United States, a survey found that federally funded researchers spend 44% of their research time meeting requirements. Graduate students are more than six times as likely as the general population to suffer moderate to severe anxiety and depression.

A good but risky question pays less than a safe little one: five small papers, each publishable within a year, are naturally “more” than one big problem that might take five years to yield anything. The rat race is nobody’s moral failing; it is the sum of everyone’s rational calculations.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhere has the fun gone?↘
Asked from elsewhereMPerishE7Pyramid

06/08Response

Will AI take away the fun?

Nobody has stopped playing

In 2019 the Go player Lee Sedol announced his retirement: even if he became number one, there would still be an entity that could not be defeated. Yet one study found that after AlphaGo, human players’ moves became more novel — and better. After losing to Deep Blue, Garry Kasparov went so far as to propose a form of chess in which humans and computers play as teams. Humans have long been unable to beat AI at these games, yet nobody has stopped playing, and commentary and post-game analysis are livelier than ever.

One mathematician passed on a colleague’s lament: “AI is destroying my journey.” Yet a 23-year-old got his first taste of doing mathematics with AI’s help. What is hard to bear may not be that AI is creative, but that its creativity comes so easily. Stop competing with AI and the journey need not vanish; it simply takes a different route. AI does not care whether your question is deep or shallow. You do.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWill AI take away the fun?↘
Asked from elsewhereE3Curtain upE5MathsE7Exit

Philidor playing chess blindfold before a crowd of onlookers. Engraving. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

07/08Design

Can research be designed like a game?

Designing for fun

The game designer Sid Meier says that games are a series of interesting decisions. So hand searching, formatting and routine calculation over to AI, and leave questioning, choosing, judging and storytelling to people. Use turns and save points to make failure cheap, battle reports to make feedback prompt, spectator stands and team battles to make research social, and achievements tied to verification to make progress visible.

Reloading a save spares you the cost of starting over, but not the frustration: nobody learns to swim without swallowing some water. And what newcomers lack most is not tutorials but companions. External stakes are no bad thing — a card game is more absorbing with a little money on it; what is bad is forgetting the game until only the stakes remain. Pleasures differ in quality, too: the sot and the wine connoisseur both say they love a drink. Foldit and the Vesuvius Challenge have already shown that good design can get many people playing seriously at a real problem.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperCan research be designed like a game?↘
Asked from elsewhereMHands-onE2CracksE3ReturnE5Shift

The flea in Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665. Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0

08/08Serious

Isn’t calling science a game a bit frivolous?

The most serious kind of game

Huizinga said long ago that play can be utterly serious: inside the circle a game marks out, its rules are absolute. The rules of science are its standards: evidence must be open to checking by others, results must be reproducible by others, reasoning must be intelligible to others. Data fabricators and paper mills are cheats. Those who chase metrics and care nothing for the problem are not so much spoilsports as players who have forgotten what they are playing: pursue honour and forget the game, and you are left with vanity.

If AI really can take on the repetitive and the laborious, what it gives back to us is leisure. Leisure is not idleness but a responsibility: no one sets your purpose for you; you have to choose for yourself what you are playing for.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperIsn’t calling science a game a bit frivolous?↘
Asked from elsewhereMCuriosity

E4The discussion goes on

The discussion goes on

?In the age of AI, can research still be fun?

Why does science happen at all? Textbooks usually say: to understand the world, to change it, to improve human welfare. None of that is wrong, but it leaves out the earliest and most enduring motive of all — curiosity, and the delight that comes with it. From the wonder, leisure and contests of the Greeks, through the early modern vindication of curiosity, to twentieth-century scientists’ defence of “the usefulness of the useless”, science has always carried a spirit of play. Yet between paper-counting and the scramble for funding, that delight is being squeezed out bit by bit, and the arrival of AI has raised the fear that discovery itself will be taken over by machines. This essay follows that thread and tries to show that AI could rob research of its joy — or give that joy back to many more people. Everything depends on how we design it.

Deep readFor Curiosity: The Play Spirit of Science~6,190 words · 9 questions · 62 sources↗
  1. 1Why do scientists do science?
  2. 2Where does the desire to know begin?
  3. 3Does the urge to win taint science?
  4. 4How was curiosity vindicated?
  5. 5Why should anyone do useless research?
  6. 6Where has the fun gone?
  7. 7Will AI take away the fun?
  8. 8Can research be designed like a game?
  9. 9Isn’t calling science a game a bit frivolous?

→Questions from here

The follow-up questions left on this page, grouped by the topic they lead to.

←Questions from elsewhere

Questions asked in other topics that lead here. Open one to return to the screen where it was asked.