People are so impressed with their own knowledge. At least that is the way it seems to me. PhDs and MDs may be the most notorious. They often seem to feel that expertise in one place shows they are smart about everything. Successful people in business are even more obnoxious feeling that if they are clever enough to make money, they are knowledgeable about everything. Others often encourage this belief. As the Fiddler on the Roof said, “Because if you’re rich they think you really know.”

Scientists are forever claiming that they “discovered” some new species or animal. Of course, the discovery is often something that indigenous people knew all along.

Scientists are just learning that other animals are intelligent, can solve problems, can communicate and have feelings. For the longest time, Scientist denied this. And yet, any child who lived on a farm around animals knew otherwise. They were especially made aware of this when the cows discovered some minor weakness in the fence and ended up on the neighbors land.

In my lifetime,

  • Doctors have denied the value of vitamin supplements while the agricultural industry was feeding them to livestock and measuring the benefits. (Not much survives the ag industry if it doesn’t generate extra income.)
  • Doctors have insisted that anti-acids and/or bland diet of baby food and goat’s milk for people with ulcers (until a rebellious Australian doctor proved that ulcers could be cured with antibiotics).
  • Dieticians have told us to avoid such “perfect foods” as eggs because they didn’t really interpret or understand the entire system’s handling of the endogenous cholesterol.
  • Physicists have announced that they have the perfect formula — or will in a year or two — Everything is understood or so they say. And yet that time frame keeps getting moved back. They have declared that the laws and constants of physics are universal throughout the universe…without really having tested this much beyond the confines of this solar system.

People continuously believe that the end of new knowledge is in sight. The entire concept of the original encyclopedia’s was to encapsulate all known knowledge. The has proven to be a fool’s errand. And people have open believed that new things were at an end. Even the head of the US patent office once stated that everything useful had already been invented.

Why so many reversals? Partly it is because things are more complex that what is known. Experts, like the rest of us, are largely ignorant. This statement is virtually a mathematical certainty. Yet, they pretend to know more than they do.

Consider the following thought experiment:

Let K be a representation of all knowledge past present and future that is, is not, could, or possible cannot be known about everything and everyone in the universe.

If K is not infinite, I believe we can agree that it certainly approaches infinity.

Mathmatically this statement looks like this.

K→∞

Let kh represent the quantity of knowledge of all of humanity. Even given the billions of people on earth, the thousands of years of knowledge accumulation, and the capacity to communicate and store information, it is likely that we would agree that although kh is a very large number, it is still a finite number mostly representing past knowledge gained and speculations about the future which in no way approaches infinity.

Any finite number divided by infinity is zero

F / ∞ = 0.

So it is safe to say, at best, that the knowledge of all mankind when compared to all knowledge is a very small number which approaches zero.

kh / K → 0

Let ki represent the level of knowledge of any single person. It is safe to say that what any one individual knows is less than the knowledge of all mankind.

ki <>h

Hence, what any one person knows also approaches zero.

ki/K → 0

It is only when we compare ourselves to another single person do we have any hope of getting some ratio that might seem noticeable—and even then, we must restrict the comparison to a tiny area of knowledge. For example, it is likely that a astronomer knows more about the stars than a farmer, but may not know much about when to plant crops.

Given what we know and do not know and our ability to assess what others do and don’t know, only pride will allow us to look at others with any sense of superiority.

Why do we still look to experts. It’s easier than trying to know every thing which is an impossibility.

For me, the conclusion is clear:

No matter how expert someone is in something, they do not have the whole picture and so one cannot rely on their knowledge and evaluations alone.

Regardless of what we think we know, we must constantly retest even the basics against the knowledge and thoughts that others bring us.

Regardless of how clever we think we are, nearly anyone around us has much to teach us.

Skepticism of anyone, expert or not, whether someone else or one’s self, is in order.