I think you are probably right that people who make a great contribution to humanity tend to be unusually curious. But that doesn't mean that being unusually curious is rational for individuals.
Replace "curious" with "X", and you've got a Fully General argument against any claim that it's rational to imitate people who make a great contribution.
Most people are highly unlikely to make a great contribution even if they really wanted to
...which may be due in part to their lack of curiosity...
and most people have other priorities anyway
Most people don't read LW. Among people who do, I expect a higher than normal percentage to have goals for which curiosity is atypically instrumentally valuable.
But even in general: most people's priority is maximizing their status. I claim that curiosity is positively correlated with status. (I don't claim the correlation is perfect.)
Kevin Laland and others recently ran a tournament to study how different learning strategies fared in evolution....[which] suggests that contestants generally overestimated the instrumental value of curiosity.
If your only goal is maximizing inclusive genetic fitness, then the "instrumental value" of a trait that only one species on Earth possesses is indeed unlikely to be very high.
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Honest question: has this ever been common? All the cases you list are "king" of their time and place.
I thought you were going to point out that adultery was the classical way of having multiple partners...
I am told this relationship style (polygynous with multiple households) is common in Latin America, and I do know several males there who have engaged in it. These males are middle-class - doctors and the like. Polygyny also occurs in other Western cultures, although more covertly, in the form of the prestigious man and his "bit on the side" (who is usually non-reproductive, monogamous and hoping to oust the current alpha female - in the absence of contraception this would probably end up with multiple households). So I'm inclined to think it happens whenever there are massive power inequalities both between males (such that a woman is better off with a fraction of the resources of a wealthy man than with all the resources of a poor man) - and between males and females (such that wealthy men are better off "collecting" multiple poor women than marrying one wealthy one).