Curiosity Test — Openness to Ideas and Being Wrong

Curiosity is easy to claim and harder to demonstrate. Nearly everyone reports enjoying learning; far fewer regularly change a position they have argued publicly. This assessment separates the pleasant part of curiosity from the uncomfortable part, because they come apart more often than people expect.

Information seeking covers the pull toward the unknown — noticing gaps, asking, looking things up. Open-mindedness covers something harder: genuine willingness to update, including on things you have already committed to in front of other people. Depth of pursuit covers whether your curiosity survives the point where a subject stops being novel and starts being technical.

The pattern worth knowing about is high seeking with low depth, which feels like intense curiosity from inside and produces broad familiarity with a great many subjects and command of none. It is the most common profile among people who consume a lot of information, and the limiting factor is not appetite but tolerance for the unglamorous middle of learning anything properly.

You get three scores charted with an interpretation of each, and a read on the gap between them — the difference between your seeking score and your depth score is usually the most informative number on the page.

All three are scored so that higher is favorable, though the interpretations note the costs: very high seeking without depth fragments attention, and very high depth without seeking narrows the field of view.