[enraged_camel]

This comes up a lot on HN and the common objection is that the criteria you listed discriminates against talented people who have families (for example) and therefore no spare time to indulge their curiosities by learning new languages or whatever.

[hodgesrm]

It's perhaps better to say, look for people who like to learn how things work. Good tech people can explain the plumbing.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Wanting to learn something is fine, being curious about a new technology is fine. It's the people who don't want to learn anything and have no curiosity about new technology. I spent 30 minutes talking to someone about their plan to build a machine learning machine and try to learn some machine learning in python.