Scientists have often seen curiosity as a motivation that compels us to discover new information and to initiate and facilitate learning. That framing suggests curiosity【C1】_____us to find answers as soon as possible. This【C2】__for answers aligns with what psychologists think is a main function of curiosity: to【C3】__uncertainty. This feeling of uncertainty then motivates a search for information that, 【C4】__obtained, is met with【C5】_____and satisfaction.

But this picture of curiosity is【C6】_____. In a recent study, we explored whether there are multiple【C7】__of curiosity.【C8】__past work has shown that higher curiosity increases motivation to get information, our study found that it also【C9】__greater avoidance of “early” answers. Why do our findings differ from those of past studies? One important difference is what happens while people wait for more information. When opportunities for seeking information【C10】__, curiosity may favor its patient accumulation. But when the information to be gained from waiting is limited,【C11】_____resolution may be desirable.

Our study【C12】_____revealed that curiosity seemed to【C13】__along with the question a person was asking, like shifting from an exploratory musing to a more focused query. Interestingly, the【C14】__for information also seemed to feel different【C15】__the journey to resolution. When uncertainty was greatest, curiosity was experienced with【C16】__. But as people got【C17】__to the big reveal, curiosity coincided with frustration. Yet【C18】_____how curiosity changed, we found that greater curiosity encouraged engagement in the process.

Our work underlines the【C19】_____of curiosity, opening new avenues for research to explore its varieties. Thinking about curiosity as going【C20】_____the need for quick answers also highlights the power of what happens when we engage with uncertainty.

Universities have boomed in recent decades. In theory, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth. In practice, however, the great expansion of higher education has coincided with a productivity slowdown. A new paper by Ashish Arora and his colleagues, suggests that universities’ rapid growth and the rich world’s stagnant productivity could be two sides of the same coin.

The new paper makes a subtle but devastating suggestion; that when it came to delivering productivity gains, the old, big-business model of science worked better than the new, university-led one. Broadly, they find that scientific breakthroughs from public institutions “elicit little or no response from established corporations” over a number of years. A research scientist in a university lab might publish brilliant paper after brilliant paper, pushing the frontier of a discipline. Often, however, this has no impact on corporations’ own publications, their patents or the number of scientists that they employ. And this, in turn, points to a small impact on economy-wide productivity.

Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities? The loss of the corporate lab is one part of the answer. Such institutions were home to a lively mixture of thinkers and doers. In the 1940s Bell Labs had the interdisciplinary team of chemists, metallurgists and physicists necessary to solve the overlapping theoretical and practical problems associated with developing the transistor. That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone. Another part of the answer concerns universities. Free from the demands of corporate overlords, research focuses more on satisfying geeks’ curiosity or boosting citation counts than it does on finding breakthroughs that will change the world or make money. In moderation, research for research’s sake is no bad thing; some breakthrough technologies, such as penicillin, were discovered almost by accident. But if everyone is arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin, the economy suffers.

When higher-education institutions do produce work that is more relevant to the real world, the consequences are troubling. As universities produce more fresh PhD graduates, companies seem to find it easier to invent new stuff. Yet universities’ patents have an offsetting effect, provoking corporations to produce fewer patents themselves. It is possible that existing businesses, worried about competition from university spinoffs, cut back on research and development (R&D) in that field. Although no one knows for sure how these opposing effects balance out, the authors point to a net decline in corporate patenting of about 1.5% a year. The vast fiscal resources devoted to public science, in other words, probably make businesses across the rich world less innovative.

Perhaps, with time, universities and the corporate sector will work together more profitably. And corporate researchers, rather than universities, are driving the current generative AI innovation boom: in a few cases, the corporate lab has already risen from the ashes. At some point, though, governments will need to ask themselves hard questions. In a world of weak economic growth, generous public support for universities may come to seem an unjustifiable luxury.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty,” and since then, federal spending on anti-poverty initiatives has steadily ballooned. The federal government now devotes hundreds of billions of dollars a year to programs that exclusively or disproportionately benefit low-income Americans. That spending has done a lot of good over the years—and yet no one would say that America has won the War on Poverty.

Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. government aggressively pursued the privatization of many government functions under the theory that businesses would compete to deliver these services more cheaply and effectively than a bunch of lazy bureaucrats. The result is a lucrative and politically powerful set of industries that are fueled by government anti-poverty programs and thus depend on poverty for their business model. These entities often take advantage of the very people they apparently serve. At the same time, badly designed anti-poverty policies have produced an ecosystem of businesses that don’t contract directly with the government but depend on taking a cut of the benefits that poor Americans receive. These industries are called “Poverty Inc.”

Perhaps the greatest damage that Poverty Inc. inflicts is through inertia. These industries have a business interest in preserving the existing structure of the government programs that create their markets or provide their easy contracts. The irony is that this kind of rent-seeking is exactly what policy makers thought they were preventing when they embraced privatization 40 years ago.

Privatization advocates were heavily influenced by “ public -choice theory,” proposed by the Nobel-winning economist James M. Buchanan. According to Buchanan, government agencies are as motivated by self-interest as any other entity. Instead of serving the public good, Buchanan argued, bureaucrats act to preserve their own status by maximizing their budgets and job security. Insulated from competition, they become inefficient and detached from the public interest. Privatization was supposed to pop that bubble of bureaucratic inertia. Instead, it merely shifted it from government agencies to corporate boardrooms.

Perhaps the clearest example of public-choice theory turned on its head is Job Corps, a $1.8 billion job-training program for young adults that, unlike most War on Poverty initiatives, has been contracted out since its start in 1964. Decades of evidence suggest that the program accomplishes very little. Nevertheless, Job Corps administrators manage to hang on to government contracts for decades. Contractors’ longevity stems in part from their ability to outlast administrations—and the simple fact that, once a contract is awarded, the company that wins it often becomes a de facto monopoly. When the next contract rolls around, there may be no credible competitors.

In short, an effort to streamline Big Government has instead preserved the worst of both worlds; all the spending and bloat of government, with none of the public accountability. No wonder, then, that poverty sticks around. There’s simply too much demand for it.

Kids don’t necessarily want to spend every waking minute staring at a screen, however strongly they give that impression. Their relationship with phones is complex and maddening, but not a million miles off adults’ own love-hate relationship with social media. Yet lately, longstanding parental unease over children’s screen habits has been hardening into something more like revolt.

In Canada last week, four school boards announced they were suing TikTok, Meta and Snapchat, claiming that compulsively appealing social media products have “ rewired the way children think, behave and learn” and left schools struggling to contain the fallout. And parents are only likely to be more alarmed by the US psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s widely publicised new book The Anxious Generation, which blames surging teenage mental health problems partly on smartphones and social media.

That connection feels instinctively right to many of us who have seen X, Facebook and Instagram bring out the inner bully, conspiracy theorist or narcissist in too many full-grown adults, never mind insecure and immature teenagers. In retrospect, letting these platforms evolve in the carelessly destructive way they did looks like madness. Yet there’s a difference between holding tech giants accountable for avoidable harms and leaping to the simplistic conclusion that social media alone explains children’s unhappiness, or that it has actively “rewired” their neurological pathways.

Reviewing Haidt’s book in the scientific journal Nature, the psychologist Candice Odgers argues that while the decline in teenage mental health did roughly overlap with the arrival of smartphones, evidence for a causal link between the two remains weak and contradictory. So far, the picture is arguably still muddled enough to allow cherrypicking of evidence by both sides—but that’s little help to anxious parents.

For teenagers with existing mental health issues who seek comfort or answers online, social media looks custom-built to amplify whatever dark feelings of inadequacy they’re already struggling with, while for bullied children, smartphones enable persecution around the clock. Those two risks alone should be enough to invoke the precautionary principle, which treats social media like alcohol or tobacco, legal harms that kids must learn to navigate eventually but preferably not before they’re mature enough to cope.

But treating smartphones as the only source of children’s unhappiness is scientifically shaky and politically too convenient, skating as it does over significantly more expensive problems to solve: poverty, parental stress, the shocking under-provision both of children’s mental health services and youth work services offering safe, interesting, alternative ways for kids to spend their time. This isn’t just about phones, but over-anxious parenting and the decline of adventurous, unsupervised play for younger children.

As a society we keep telling kids to get off their phones into the real world, but won’t make room for them here; we put adult convenience first, and are then surprised when children don’t flourish. The tech giants could and should do vastly more to create a healthy environment for children. But in that, they’re very much not alone.

In a recent talk at the launch of the new Committee for Academic Freedom, philosopher Kathleen Stock recalled research seminars at the universities of St Andrews and Leeds in the 1990s, in which faculty would continuously search for weak points in arguments and not hesitate to raise these during questions following the seminar, often in a biting fashion.

Since the 2010s, as Stock noted, there has been a marked turn away from this combative style of debate, a move driven in part by feminist activists, who argued that such an atmosphere deterred women from participation. From this came new codes of conduct for academic events. Some such recommendations are eminently reasonable, entailing avoidance of personal attacks, sustained disruption of events and anything relating to the identity of the participants. But other guidelines, relating to undefined concepts of harassment, power dynamics and offence, can deter robust interrogation of scholarly material.

Stock expressed regret for the decline of the older, “scathing” debating style, which featured a “ magnificent contempt for stupid ideas”. More common today are insipid responses. Highly contestable views are met mostly with polite nodding or silence, an artificial “ respect” which really amounts to disengagement.

Both peer review and published review serve a vital self-regulatory role for scholarship. If an academic’s arguments, reasoning or use of data are open to challenge, another scholar will provide the appropriate critique, supplementing and enhancing the relevant body of discourse. This idealistic model is inevitably tempered by other power dynamics, particularly those affecting young or precariously employed academics. But it should not be unthinkable that senior figures could respect the right of juniors to participate in the process in such a manner.

Without negative reviews or feedback, positive reviews lose their significance. No work can be viewed as remarkable unless it can be contrasted with other work of lesser value. There are qualities to be discerned in vital scholarly writing, as distinct from that designed for other purposes; without any sense of these, or mechanisms for ensuring they are sustained, the justifications for financial and other support for scholarly endeavour become undermined.

Stock maintains that “terrible ideas” are found most often in areas of the humanities with less methodological consensus than the sciences. Among those, ethnography is especially problematic, where the distinction is blurred between journalistic description and scholarly analysis. More widely across disciplines, important and multifaceted concepts such as “ social justice” are often voided of a clear definition and become proxies for adherence to a particular political ideology. Such an academic culture, in which political allegiance matters more than intellectual rigour, makes possible scholarly hoaxes.

Globally, 1.2 million species of organisms have been scientifically identified. Scientists have deduced the diversity of under-researched groups from the number of species and higher-level taxonomic categories in extensively studied groups, such as birds. On average, wild populations monitored by biologists over the past 50 years lost 69 percent of their members, according to the Living Planet Index. Our immediate biodiversity crisis isn’t one of species loss; it’s the lost abundance of wild things. The problem has become prevalent and systemic in recent decades.

Many experts and policy makers accept the incidental damage as a cost of doing business on this planet. That’s because their economic scorecards count what’s measurably good for human beings. Something that’s good for two people is twice as good as something that’s good for one person.【T1】From this point of view, a world drained of wildlife with a lot of people making increasing amounts of money is heading in the right direction. The losses of joy, wonder, and ethical interspecific relations are real, but, in contrast to our material gains, resist measurement.

Economics is nicknamed the “dismal science,” but many of its practitioners are far more optimistic than biologists about our species’ future.【T2】They propose that economic growth can continue forever on a planet that is staying the same size, because scarcity is not the sad opposite of abundance, but the mother of invention. When goods become scarce, substitutes become valuable. If ready substitutes aren’t available, people innovate and tame scarcity. Over and over. Substitution is seen as a remedy both for the shortage of production’s inputs and, nowadays, for the menacing excess of its emissions. But substitution won’t save us indefinitely, and typically leads to another round of unforeseen damage.

It’s not too late for an abundant Earth.【T3】Recovery starts with making wild abundance an explicit objective and letting our economic and social lives center around it. The most important thing people can do for wild populations is to give them space, starting with the spaces that aren’t yet fragmented. Twenty percent of Earth’s forests, for instance, are still big and unfragmented, “intact forest landscapes”.【T4】Securing these forests now is a bargain compared with the cost of removing roads and industry to regrow them later.

We also need laws that go beyond sustaining scarcity and regrow biological plenty. Rather than attempting to codify abundance on a species-by-species basis, as the Endangered Species Act does for extinction risk,【T5】such laws must consider life at the ecosystem level and reduce the causes of wildlife depletion without knowing precisely how much natural abundance will return. Let’s nurture the Earth so that people once again can know they are part of a wild world disposed— and able—to host abundant life.