Why do Java people frequently consume exceptions silently?

Usually that is due to the IDE offering a helpful 'quick fix' that wraps the offending code in a try-catch block with that exception handling. The idea is that you actually DO something, but lazy developers don't.

This is bad form, no doubt.

This is a classic straw man argument. printStackTrace() is a debugging aid. If you saw it on a blog or in a magazine it was because the writer was more interested in illustrating a point other than exception handling. If you saw it in production code, the developer of that code was ignorant or lazy, nothing more. It shouldn't be held up as an example of common practice in the "java world".

1. Java forces you to handle all Exceptions explicitly. If a method that your code calls is declared to throw FooException and BarException your code MUST handle (or throw) those exceptions. The only exception to this is RuntimeException, which is silent like a ninja.
2. Lots of programmers are lazy (myself included), and it's very easy to just print the stack trace.

I have always thought, that's similar to the following scenario:

"A man gets shot.

He holds his breath and has enough strength to take a bus.

10 miles later the man gets off of the bus, walks a couple of blocks and dies."

When the police gets to the body, they don't have a clue of what has just happened. They may have eventually but it is much harder.

Better is:

"A man gets shot and he dies instantly, and the body lies exactly where the murder just happened."

When the police arrives, all the evidence is in place.

If a system is to fail, better is to fail fast

Addressing the question:

1. Ignorance.
   +
2. Sloth

EDIT:

Of course, the catch section is useful.

If something can be done with the exception, that's where it should be done.

Probably that is NOT an exception for the given code, probably it is something that is expected ( and in my analogy is like a bulletproof jacket, and the man was waiting for the shot in first place ).

And yes, the catch could be used to Throw exceptions appropriate to the abstraction