Ep. #275: Pick A Book, Any Book: Curiosity & Media Choices, with XuanJun Gong

XuanJun Gong is interested in media selection, computational modeling, communication networks, and information diffusion. He’s looked at how we choose media to manage our moods, how the sequence of our choices matters, and what draws us to that next book. All of this is one version or another of the old curiosity conundrum: explore or exploit? Do we seek novelty or leverage what we already know? Why? Does it get us what we want?  How do we even know….? XuanJun Gong: https://www.xuanjungong.com Theme music by Sean Balick; "Zig Zag Heart" by Nursery, via Blue Dot Sessions.