Feeding My Ignorance

This blog is predicated on the fact that there is a huge amount of 'stuff' that I don''t know - the quotation from Einstein sort of sums it up and I find it proven almost daily. Even so it is always comforting when there is some sort of independent corroboration in the form of someone else saying similar things - even if that does rather smack of confirmation bias.

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Yesterday I came across this article by Steven Kalas - not someone who's name I have come across before. It is quite a short read, but echoes much of what I mean when I talk about feeding my ignorance. Of course I am aware that my thoughts and ideas around this are not that original, it is no real surprise that others are reaching the same conclusions, but that does not diminish the little burst of satisfaction that I get when I encounter the same thoughts in someone else's words.

It was a few years ago now that I first published anything along these lines. My paper "The Illusion of Knowledge" was targeted specifically at the audience at the INCOSE conference in Rome and the examples I used to illustrate the points were very much drawn from the workspace of the systems engineering community. However, the principles (as I said then) apply to all facets of life and if everyone was more ready to say "I don't know" and admit their own ignorance on some subjects then I am sure that the world would be a better place.

Progress can only be made by some sort of change - and change cannot happen if we believe that we already know everything - and crucially - that everything we know is right!;