Conferences (academic and industrial). If you’re a developer, going to a software conference like PyCon or Strange Loop (and being sociable when you’re there) w

Conferences (academic and industrial). If you’re a developer, going to a software conference like PyCon or Strange Loop (and being sociable when you’re there) will bump you up against lots of curious people. Local chapters of academic societies (like INFORMS for operations research). Lots of people love to talk shop and learn what other people are doing. Taking adult education courses at a good university will help you meet such people as well. Meetups — hit or miss. Some are self filtering like functional programming or philosophy but if you go to a cloud computing meet up you’re likely to meet people who are there for professional reasons. They’re curious too but more for the sake of their jobs. Bear in mind that these are people curious about specific things. If you want to find well rounded individuals that are curious about lots of things, well they’re rare and there’s unlikely to be a watering hole where they congregate because the intersecting set of interests between them is likely small. University clubs might be an avenue but if you’re no longer in school they’re not really accessible to you.