The curious case of curiosity

If there's any environment in which curiosity should be positively encouraged, surely it should be academia. And yet, as Joe Moran has lamented in an excellent piece for the Times Higher Education, it's currently being squeezed out there too, in the shallow and short-termist pursuit of targets and measurables: "the incurious satisficers, who only want data to be mongered and boxes to be ticked, are ruling over our benighted present".

Moran's advice is not to worry too much, though. Curiosity is a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human, critical in developing our knowledge and understanding (whether scientific or otherwise), and - he argues - the curious will win out over the blinkered box-tickers in the end.

(Thanks to Terry for the link.)