What a daft comment that was. Three out of the four links you provided interested me as they did you. It’s just that the fourth one curdles my neurons if I try to think about it.

Another little irony, my D20 character is a Lawful Good-ish thug and tax collector, and the one thing that can make me almost enjoy looking up tax-related gumf, which I hate doing as part of real life, is when I see the chance of giving him a good sneering line. The running joke in the game is that vampires and Dark Elves who snap their fingers at the police, army, MI5 et al go green at the gills (or racially appropriate equivalent) when threatened with a tax audit.

I do know exactly what you mean about unwanted knowledge. As you probably already know, and want to know, and I’ll stop lampshading it from now on, it says in the first Sherlock Holmes story that he tried to keep his mind clear of unnecessary knowledge even to the extent of trying to forget that the earth went round the sun. Doyle pulled back from having his character make quite such an extreme efforts later, as he probably realised that that very piece of knowledge might easily have practical applications to murder – but there’s something in the concept when the unwanted knowledge doesn’t even have the dignity of relating to the natural world; it’s all just the stupid, fickle, lying rules of a stupid, fickle, lying scam and group delusion.