Pilgrimage to the land of knowledge goblins
In a dark room 5 am, a knowledge goblin grunts, lying on his bed. The only sound surrounding him is white noise his fridge generates. The fridge is not full, unlike his mind full of declarative knowledge.
Knowledge goblin is an organism that adapts to its environment with most of its resources allocated to learning. Commander-in-chief of all the knowledge goblins once said brain is perfectly adaptable device. This means only internal signals may serve as a guidance for the goblin’s navigation in life. This is a spiritual tradition of a goblin to live in harmony with his learn drive to avoid maladaptation.
Goblin instinct is to hunt for golden nuggets of knowledge (“nugs”) to help it thrive. This is typically in pursuit of freedom to further amplify its goblin lifestyle.
Goblins are notorious treasure hunters, rather than objective driven creatures. If you ask a goblin where it is trying to go, you will more often than not get nonsensical answers like:
“I’m not going anywhere in particular. I’m amplifying my ability to get everywhere”
“I am not a finder, I am a collector.”
A common knee-jerk reaction is also vague talk about “stepping stones”, which is typically in reference to accumulation of knowledge (“potential”) that might help the goblin to make a leap to new frontiers.
A common variation of a knowledge goblin is one who possesses anti-social traits, such as stealing nuggets from its fellow goblins, and acting as if it came up with the nugget. These sort of goblins are called “nugget burglars”. A common sign that you might be dealing with a nugget burglar is hint of desperation and overenthusiastic attitude towards a nugget you present in conversation. Their knowledge valuations are abnormally high, and social skills abnormally low, which leads to the mentioned uncivilized behavior of nug stealing.
Knowledge goblins are especially sensitive to signals of knowledge gaps in their concept network. When encountered with such situation, it will arise unusually amplified arousal. This may be uncanny to observe as an outsider.
As social creatures, humans tend to laugh about absurd situations they have encountered, or funny references they came up with. Knowledge goblins work more in isolation, surrounded by abstractions, and this tends to reflect in their sense of humor.
Natural enemies of knowledge goblins are not organisms that threat their existence, but low signal-to-noise ratio of the knowledge they are consuming. More specifically, verbose, poor structure, unadventurous hypotheses, asemantic material and such are obstacles to the goblin’s hunt. These will result either in decoding failures, or poor knowledge valuations, which in return will arouse anger in the goblin.