This is an interesting question, one I've been wondering about lately.<p>When I was a little kid, I had a very strong (and I now realize, unusual) affinity for the <i>truth</i>. I would feel bad if I told someone a fact which I later learned to be false. I felt that if I said something that was false, I was contaminating people's understanding of the world, and this was a wrong thing to do.  I didn't frame it this way, in those words, of course, but I remember that this was my explicit thought -- that spreading inaccurate representations of the world was a bad thing to do.<p>I wonder if many hardcore technical people (I am getting tired of the word "geek") perhaps share this early attitude of mine.<p>To indulge in some evolutionary psychology, I wonder if this aversion to spreading misinformation was an adaptive trait back when proto-humans lived in small troops -- spread misinformation, and people on whom you relied would be lead astray, to your own detriment.