I think it's mostly twelve years of government education that stomps out most people's natural curiosity and desire to learn. Despite that, plenty of people put in a lot of time and effort about a lot of useful things just out of interest. I'm certainly spending plenty of time learning about Bitcoin, gathering useful info I can share with others. I know people who learn about and tinker with cars, constantly improving their knowledge and skills, including the parts they don't like as much, just for the sheer joy of it, and to be able to say, "Yeah, I made this." Even those who waste their brilliant potential can unlearn their state-ingrained habits. Check out
Montessori schools for an interesting look at this.
Now, as far as the idea of someone wanting to suck off my long hours of learning and hard hours of labor for free? Yeah, that's totally unacceptable, and most people will balk when that gets brought up. In fact, if it's insisted upon, you'll eventually find many people refusing to study, learn and develop themselves, even for their own enjoyment, simply because they know others will come by and take the fruits of their labor from them.
Incentives will always be needed to get people to perform at their best consistently, in a way that benefits others. Personally, I see positive, voluntary incentives (prime example: free trade) as the ideal kind.
+1
I agree with this. Incentives are obviously needed, my view is that we should really nurture the natural creativity and curiosity children have. With that approach I believe it would be possible to organize work based on real interest, as long as people get enough pay to have a decent livelihood (or in the case of RBE, simply the livelihood). It's very important though that this is the approach from the start. Scientific studies on motivations have proven that the original interest people have in any subject lessens once you put monetary reward in the picture. Even if you remove the monetary reward later, people will never be as interested as they originally were, because they are expecting a monetary reward.
Also it's interesting that for any job that requires advanced problem solving (the jobs that can't easily be automated), monetary rewards, especially predictable ones, cause people to perform worse. Thinking about the money takes away from our brain capacity to solve the problem and for any advanced work people will actually be more productive if you can provide different incentives. For people working at a factory line this is different and monetary incentives have been proven to work but that kind of jobs are on their way out.