It'd be nice if we had on hand a lemma that stated that intellectual curiosity, once "proven" as a property of one phase of a person's life, will remain as a property of that person in all later phases, even if the indicator signal for it disappears. Then we could just look for people who look like they once were intellectually curious (perhaps in college) and then hire them on the basis that they'll be able to pick it right back up if given the time and the motivation.

Of course, nobody has ever done any experimentation to prove such a hypothesis so that it could be used as a lemma.

I often wish there was some sort of prediction market of I/O-psychology hypotheses that you could just throw a random prediction onto. The stakes on the most contentious results would then prompt the investors to leverage their bets with research organizations into grant-funding to study those questions.