In the past few months, I've seen several people grow dissatisfied with their lives and seek change by quitting their jobs and going back to school. The less creative ones choose business school, the more creative ones spend a few months in France studying French.

There's a demand for something more, a search for greater satisfaction. People know what they don't like, and are willing to invest time and money (especially for MBAs) to get change, especially change that is legitimized by broader society.

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I absorbed a specific set of aesthetic preferences over the time I was in school. I enjoy technical stories -- stories which are specific and precise with respect to certain types of details. I acquired a definite bar for understanding, and feel a special joy when I learn enough about a new topic that it crosses that bar.

This description of what it is that I picked up sounds very good, and that's not a coincidence. Education is significant in promoting skill acquisition, but it is often the effects on identity and motivation that are the most overwhelming. I feel good when I say good things about myself, and so I persist in doing that.

Objectively, it is the rules of storytelling which govern how good a particular life story sounds. Even though in theory everything you need for self-deception is inside your head, thankfully it isn't that easy.

There's no accounting for the lack of taste in stories though. I can imagine that for some who genuinely couldn't tell between a good story and a bad one, self-deception would also be a difficult trap to avoid.

The veritasium guy talks about the importance of independent thought to learning. I think that often when you mention independent thought, people immediately see it in terms of creativity and expression and other artsy concepts. As Derek explains in this video, however, independent thinking has benefits that go beyond originality - it is also a great source of efficiency in learning, as constructing a coherent and consistent worldview in your head means that many things get checked and re-iterated every time you come across a new fact.

If you were to ask people to name some science popularizers, they might name Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson. Veritasium impresses me a lot more.

The thing about the types of questions that Hawking or Tyson raise is that they are not the types of questions that people think of themselves as being able to answer. Yes I am made of stardust, sure, but knowing that fact doesn't change anything I do in real life, and wasn't something I thought I could answer in the first place.

The Veritasium videos, on the other hand, are full of simple surprises:

• Where does the weight of a tree come from?
• How do objects make shadows?
• How do we see patterns on spinning tubes?

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I've tried to amuse other people with these videos and been disappointed to find them un-amused. I suspect this is largely because to appreciate these things you need to have had expectations to begin with.

Children are easy to amuse because they are actively learning about the world, and have a constant cycle of assumption formation and surprise and learning going on; as people grow older, they come to accept that they can't know about everything.

There are many different ways of not knowing, however. The attitude imbued by scientific training is a very constructive one, where ignorance is recognized as being transient and resources can be invested if a piece of knowledge is deemed valuable enough.

The most unfortunate attitude I've come across is cynical resignation and almost total lack of curiosity -- such people are often also beset by what they see as injustices big and small as they are buffeted by the world in directions which, through their ignorance, they see as random and unchangeable. Many of them turn dualist / spiritual, and in an effort to avoid being wrong resort to beliefs that are not even wrong.