Ignorance and Indolence...<p>There is an apocryphal story about Gauss (18th cent mathematician). As an 8 yr old he was given a punishment or busywork to add the numbers up from 1 to 100. The kind of tedious task intended to punish or control kids.<p>He had the quick insight that it was really just 50 pairings of 101 so solved it in less than a minute. So there is a kind of productive laziness and a constructive ignorance of the process.<p>Even as an 8 yr old I imagine he understood what the teacher was trying to do by giving him such a task and he remained willfully ignorant of it.