Ignorance and Indolence... 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

Ignorance and Indolence... 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. 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. 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.