I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful. Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems.
--- Juergen Schmidhuber :: Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes. Journal of SICE 48(1), 21-32, 2009, arXiv:0812.4360
Once upon a time, Nita's boss started their days gathering the team around for an hour of story telling. First listening to theirs - what they were doing, what they needed to succeed - and then telling one of his own. How he saw the world and how that translated to the systems he built.
I believe the most effective form of teaching is story telling. The setting, the characters, and the plot are always the same. A journey from ignorance into light... Pilgrim's Progress as pedagogy. The story provides the structure that both the lesson and the reader can hold. A metaphor is a wonderful means of combining both the translation of the idea and its compression into a single artifact. Besides, it's fun to use our imaginations - at least that's what I keep telling my children :)
Story telling is a symmetric process, all information exchange is. The speaker changes as much as their audience through the telling of the story. It's what make the form so effective not just as a vector of information exchange, but for its very production. And it's why I choose it over any other - comedy and storytelling two crafts that provide feedback to the creator in a very particular form, a very rewarding one.
In what other disciplines do laughter and smiles also mean a lesson has been learned?
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