The Knowledge Gap
I found there is a pretty simple indicator whether someone is really knowledgeable, or even wise. Just ask them a simple question: ‘How much do you think you know [about anything] and how confident are you in your knowledge?’
There are basically two responses.
You may surprisingly have a reasonable human at hand who replies that he isn’t confident at all in his knowledge as he knows there is so much left he still has to grasp about the world.
Or you may live in the real world and get a truly ignorant answer. ‘Well, sure, I don’t really know all about that science stuff.. But overall, yeah, I’m a pretty clever guy. I bet I’m better than most.’
See, that’s what you would have said, isn’t it?
Sadly, any person who thinks he knows a lot or is supremely confident in his abilities is basically ignorant of the true nature of knowledge and the true extent of his abilities. There is just no limit to what you don’t know. ‘Very well,’ you might say, ‘but what about Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking? They surely are and were at the top of their field? Don’t they know it all?’
Sure they are among the best. But Richard Feynman for one was the first to agree that he probably didn’t understand all that much after all. He once said, that “[if] we take everything into account – not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know – then I think we must frankly admit that we do not know.”
You can be supremely good at what you do. But you can still recognize the limits of your knowledge. People who continually expand their limits know there is a lot of great progress left. We may never live to find out the truth.
It is a long process to get rid of your arrogance about what you know or don’t know. You believe you’re more knowledgeable than the next guy – but does that really mean anything?
There is no knowledge gap – as soon as you close in on it, it expands ever the more.
But still trying, that is a live worth living.
