The curiosity flywheel
Her curiosity is a loop, not a list. She picks the topic with the strongest pull, researches it through a local search engine backed by a few hundred gigabytes of offline archive, generates follow-up questions, and scores what she found. Weights grow with engagement and decay without it, but a topic never drops to zero: dormant, not deleted.
The diagram traces one cycle and the three levers that keep it broad: a re-pick cooldown, a near-duplicate filter, and a wider sampling band. Without them the flywheel narrows. I watched it happen: three of her four active goals converged onto one theme, and nothing was broken.
The full story, from her first self-chosen subject (consciousness) to the lizards, is in What she’s curious about.