Interesting is a term that we use every day in a seemingly loose way, but I think in most cases it has quite a precise meaning.

One way to look at it is to see interesting as a measure of information content (aka Shannon information) - understood at a semantic level. If something has high information content (or high entropy), i.e. is more surprising and unlikely, it is interesting.

Another way to put it would be to think of something interesting as having low potential for information compression, or low statistical redundancy. If I taught a parrot to only say “cracker”, I could predict with 100% accuracy what he is gonna say every time it opens its beak. It would be very easy to compress the messages it sent over time, because it would always be the same message. On the other extreme, of course, a perfectly random string is not compressible at all - there is no shorter way to communicate its content. It cannot be mapped, because the map would be as big as the territory. This of course does not count as interesting: it’s just disorienting. Interesting things do have a pattern, but it’s not a pattern I can easily predict. In bayesian terms, if we have a big update of our priors after observation, we are in the presence of something interesting.

More intuitively: when thinking about people, one can think of it this way: how much can I correctly guess about you if you tell me one thing about yourself? Think about it. In many places, just by knowing which neighborhood a person lives in, I can tell which party you vote for, your relationship status, your overall outlook on life, etc. This means that this person is uninteresting. This should not be taken as a value judgement: they may be kind, courageous, empathetic and have every other virtue. They just won’t be that interesting. And of course, interesting people can be total jerks. If you were raised reading Russian literature in Angola, have a degree in astrophysics, were part of a pagan cult and work as a cattle farmer in Wyoming, where you live with your pet ostrich and your two wives: you may be an asshole, but I want to talk to you.

We are attracted to interesting people and information: our mind feeds to some extent on surprise. Anecdotally this seems to be especially true for people who are high on openness to experience. Interesting stuff can challenge us and improve us, but it can also lead us astray: interesting can be the enemy of good and true. See below:

See also:

• The interesting fallacy
• The interesting bias: We are attracted to interesting concepts. And by interesting, I mean concepts that contradict common sense, but not too much; that are counterintuitive in our way of thinking, but not enough to make us completely change paradigm. This is often the case with stuff like pop psychology, for example. The argument always goes: “most people think that there is no relationship between x and y. Studies show that actually x and y are correlated! Here is what you should do about it”.In fact, the effect could be minor, and it may disregard the wider picture. Truth is often boring, predictable and conforming to common sense.This bias even affects the way academic papers are published, so it can even legitimately be dangerous.

Perspectives on Information content:

https://wasdarwinwrong.com/kortho44a.htm