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∞ posted 2 years ago contains 191 notes and reblogged from maxistentialist

maxistentialist:

Here’s a great article about 3 types of knowledge.

Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary?

There are three types of knowledge:

1. Stuff you know
2. Stuff you know you don’t know
3. Stuff you don’t know you don’t know

Most people assume that learning is adding as much as possible to group “a,” but learning predominantly involves moving as much as possible out of group “c.”

Along these lines, “wisdom” may be defined as the ability to not be dangerous. So what then is the point of education and experience? Your professors and teachers (and typical exam structure) would lead you to believe that you must cram as much information as possible into the shit you know category.

I am going to be bold and suggest that this is wrong. The goal isn’t to put as much as possible into the first category, it’s to take as much as possible out of the third category.

Basically - the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. This is more or less what Plato said.

Be wary of people who think they know exactly what they are doing.

They legitimately think they know everything. The thing is, they don’t. These people are usually very egotistical (not to be confused with simply having a healthy ego) and don’t realize how little they really know. In other words, they have far more in the third category (shit they don’t know they don’t know), and far less in the second category (shit they know they don’t know). The first category is probably more or less the same.