New Curiosity Hypothesis/Synthesis

Because personnel is policy, if you are a curious person, you become knowledgeable. You will then become wise if for no other reason that some of the knowledge you gather will be profound and meaningful, just by chance. It's impossible to avoid unless you already know it well enough to characterize it, and thus already haven't avoided it.

Prussian school is specifically designed to destroy curiosity by means of constant gaslighting: they tell you over and over that what they do there is learning, so you associate it with the idea of learning. Naturally it is in fact the opposite of learning. You actively become more deluded at Prussian school, which is much of why it's so painful. Even small untrained children can feel that delusion is more uncomfortable than revelation.

Why does it seem to me that nobody knows anything? Duh, nobody else resisted the curiosity-destroying effects of Prussian school. If you don't ask stupid questions you become the kind of person who doesn't ask questions and remains stupid. Such resistance is quite painful, after all, and has to be sustained for over a decade.

 

Ignorance has always been a choice. If you seek knowledge, knowledge will be found. Sol provides for all of us, and likewise the gods of insight and revelation are incomprehensibly generous. Ask and ye shall receive. 

I find the internet makes this exactly normal and the way it always was. Yes, you can find good sources of knowledge without even leaving your room - you can also find vast fields of delusion and politics. Whether you want to wade through oceans of sewage or suffer the inconvenience of seeking out richer nuggets of knowledge using more traditional methods is largely a matter of taste. The costs in time and energy about equal out.
The difference is merely that an internet society is richer in general, and one of the things folk buy with money is knowledge, meaning there is more knowledge to be found in general. 

The reason the internet is dominated by sewer lines is because demand for knowledge is at a nadir. Full ebb. New moon at the brightest. On the plus side, this means the price of knowledge (assuming you can find a supplier) is extremely low. Too cheap to meter in most cases. However, like any extreme fringe hobby, it is difficult (thus a little expensive) to find a supply...

 

The sewage suppliers like to say knowledge is difficult, to help their customers with the cognitive dissonance. The customers know they're supposed to guzzle sewage, but sewage tastes bad so they need all sorts of support to choke it down. That's just how dedicated they are to acting the way they're supposed to, though. 

In reality verifying knowledge is easy. In most cases it's all NP-complete, meaning difficult to come up with but near-trivial to verify.  If you can't verify it, it means you can't apply it, and it doesn't count as wisdom. Isn't that neat. 

 

Going to the gym has a noticeable j-shaped results curve. However, it's short. Going only once or twice is enough to starting seeing a beneficial effect. Further, the pain is mitigated. It's "good" pain.

Going to the intellectual gym has a much more distinct j-shaped results curve. At first, you only know enough to get yourself into trouble, not to get out of the trouble. At first, you know enough to make all your friends think you're weird, but not enough to get better results. Indeed at first you're replacing the dumb flailing you've practiced at your whole life with focused strategy which you've hardly ever tried before; for some reason the latter doesn't compare favourably.
At first.
If you commit to being knowledgeable, it's important to commit. It's a long journey to positive returns, and (although I have hardly had the chance to test it) you can't stop halfway. Once you undo a load-bearing illusion, you have to pay the costs of bearing the load yourself, but you're not necessarily ready to construct your own revelation. Decide you don't want to pay the costs? Too late. Shouldn't have started in the first place.

Bit of a catch-22 there. The only way to really know if knowledge is worthwhile to you is to already be knowledgeable. Gotta take a guess and hope you luck out.