[bsrhng]

What it 'really is' is mostly a construction, an amalgam of perceptions that are usually descriptions of observers of what other people seem to do when they find things out or how they've got to discovering something. What you call trait curiosity is, it seems to me, a consequence of the fact that curiosity is of course sexy and highly desirable. If you read popular science books that's what they tell you, there are some people that are curious and just wanting to know stuff and just like that they get Nobel prizes.

I think trait curiosity works similarly with other traits that people can fall into the trap of ascribing to themselves. For example, telling others that you are hard working, never giving up, always being there for people or whatever. Once you start repeating to yourself and to others such statements you can in a sense 'lock yourself' into it. You get into situation where you start thinking 'well, a curious person in this situation should do this, I better do it or else I'm not curious'. I think this is the difference in outcome in trivial pursuits as you say.

On the other hand it's very difficult to be curious about something you really know nothing or very little about. It really makes little sense to be curious about cryptography or quantum computing if you struggled with high school algebra and never made any serious effort to improve your skills and understanding.

Of course none of this is to claim that there is no such thing as pursuing knowledge or ideas without seemingly any external motivation. The way it looks from the inside I think is usually you have to have some idea of what you're doing and you want to see if you can apply this to something else. Counterintuitively, here you're trying to see if something that should be considered different is in fact some slight modification of what you already know. So it's usually not "let's learn something completely new because I like to learn things and am curious" but "let's see if I can reformulate this thing that looks unknown to something that I know". This is the creative part where you are actually learning. The process of reformulating or restating something with a language that you understand and you've built for yourself, bringing in the new idea, often not explicitly stated to be connected with what you know, is what gives you the kick.