Sowell, Gleiser, Popper, and the Infinity of Ignorance
Sowell, Gleiser, Popper, and the Infinity of Ignorance
Three Point Thursday | 3 Timeless Maxims
To curious minds,
Happy Three Point Thursday.
Here are 3 quotes I’m thinking about:
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”
— Thomas Sowell
“As the island of knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance…”
— Marcelo Gleiser
“While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”
― Karl Popper
I used to work at a sad liquor store. Bad choice of a summer job. It sucked. I tried to make it suck less by bringing in books to read. This old guy who worked there used to yell at me for it.
One time during a shift I was reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, when a great line struck me — it called the scientific revolution the discovery of ignorance.
It was a cool way of saying that, Western Civilization going from the faithful mindset of “knowing it all,” to the scientific mindset of “wow we don’t know much at all actually,” is what led to exponential progress.
I think every smart mind, at some point, experiences this mindset shift on a personal level.
There is good reason that the timeless archetype of the bozo is someone who already knows it all. Only someone who neither reads seriously nor thinks deeply could be so assured of the vastness of their knowledge.
Conversely, the ancients believed the wisest of people were those who “knew that they knew nothing.” This is the mindset of eternal learners: they understand that the greatest enemy of learning is the illusion of being learned.
Eternal learners can also see that we are living in the slightly less dark ages. The same way we laugh at how people lived in the Middle Ages, humans of the future will laugh at how we now live. Possibly to an even greater extent. We are still only at the base of exponential with many revolutionary technologies.
Stay curious.