I think you can determine how curious you are relative to other people in general by roughly keeping track of how often you are interested in other people's hobbies versus how often they are interested in yours. It won't tell you anything about a particular person, but over a year, if you're interested in other people's hobbies daily and other people never care about yours, it's safe to assume that you're more curious than the average person.

I was going to add that this only works if your hobbies are fairly normal hobbies, but wouldn't it also be safe to assume that you're more curious than normal if you have a bunch of normal hobbies in addition to a bunch of unusual hobbies that no one wants to talk about?

I think theres a pretty obvious difference between da Vinci-esque broad-reaching intrigue and just having a certain set of hobbies.

I think it's not that they're uncurious but that maybe their lives are full of a routine that limits acting on it hence why I said they get swallowed whole by their daily lives.

You would enjoy James Burke's Connections series. It is curiosity driven.

There are very few Renaissance men (and women) around today. I've met a startling number of people who spend time online but never encountered Wikipedia, there is also very large number of university students who have no interest in reading. This goes to show it is not about access to information or elite institutions.

That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It is probably more worthwhile because fewer people are doing it. One prominent example among ourselves is Gwern, he is a great example to us. A lot of the most interesting threads on HN are where the discussion is regarding something not obviously connected to programming, such as woodworking. The most famous AMA in Reddit's history was a vacuum cleaner salesman, which was fascinating and bolstered my regard for Redditors as a healthy if fractious community with a native curiosity not evident on most social networking sites. In my opinion the best people have a mixture of useful values from different social classes - working, middle, upper. LessWrong has an expression parallel to this I'll paraphrase as 'hold your identity loosely'.

If anybody feels like they're stuck in a rut, unmotivated to be 'curiosity-productive', check out 'Japanology' on Youtube. Peter Barakan could make anything interesting. I always get a lift after watching his documentaries.