Given that we are so ignorant of so many things, why do so many people waste time and effort becoming knowledgeable about things that are not important, using intelligence-resources that could have been spent learning something useful.

(3) Knowledge of religious claims. Religions don't even make good history. We can gain some knowledge about people, their values, and how they behave from stories. However, we can get these stories from any piece of fiction (and even better from any peace of history). It is still far better for us when we study what it is to be human in a work that we know to be fiction than one that is fiction but mistakenly taken to be fact.