This fact, as I would call it, is interesting when one contemplates that curiosity is neurologically the opposite of trauma.
I was also reading today that an effect of unregulated stress is narrowed and tightened vision. This made me wonder if compulsive reading might not be a means some people use to deflect attention from the fact that they do not like to engage socially with others, which in turn made me wonder if academics and intellectuals are more or less self sorted from the pool of those most affected by early trauma, and least able to deal with it. If you add the consideration that a certain level of intelligence is still needed to succeed, then most of the modern world can be constructed from unprocessed primal and dysfunctional emotions, translated into ideological form, and then applied and amplified effectively across mass media. Bad ideas have as much power as good ones, and little else can be expected from people hiding from themselves, from others, and from the world at large.
This seems likely to me. The world is stupid. People are stupid. There obviously are reasons, and these reasons, I see reason to assume, can be known, or at least largely known. We can do so much better. Our best and brightest are dull and insipid.