“A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.”
They say that a little bit of knowledge is a very dangerous thing. I remember when I was going through school as a psychology student, I found myself suffering from the psychology equivalent of medical student syndrome. I was self-diagnosing myself (and those around me) with just about everything, recognizing this symptom and that.
Of course, I was only armed with a little bit of information. I had only taken a handful of introductory courses on psychology and I certainly was not qualified to make those diagnoses. You see the same thing all the time in the world of politics and public policy. Suddenly, with access to the Internet and reading little tidbits of information, everyone thinks they’re an expert. Of course, they’re equally likely to fall into the trap of collective ignorance and the echo chamber will simply reinforce that false knowledge and lack of context.
The Tip of the Iceberg
But I’d rather know a little something than not know anything at all. Armed with that little nugget of knowledge, I must then seek out supplementary information. I must learn more about that topic. And that’s how you slowly develop your knowledge base on any particular subject. Especially when we have a world of knowledge at our fingertips, ignorance is no excuse. As Neil deGrasse Tyson once told us, the “smart” person is not the one who can memorize facts; it’s the person who “can figure stuff out.”
I’d imagine that Bob Edwards would agree. Best known as the host of The Bob Edwards Show on XM Satellite Radio, as well as being the one-time host of Morning Edition on NPR, Edwards reminds us that while it is true that a little bit of knowledge can be bad, “a lot of ignorance is just as bad.”
A Good Slippery Slope
I’d argue that a lot of ignorance is actually worse, because “a little learning” can lend itself to more learning. That’s how we grow and evolve. That’s how we become more knowledgeable. In fact, while it may be true that ignorance is bliss, it seems like the more you learn, the more you realize how little you really know. I think that the real experts in any field should almost be the most skeptical too. Indeed, the very nature of science is to “know” nothing and question everything.
So, get out there and learn something. Then, you can realize how much more learning you have to do.
This reminds me of a graph I once saw. The x-axis was how much you had learnt about a particular topic, and the y-axis was something along the lines of how good you feel about it (or how confident you are, or something like that). At first there’s a positive correlation, but then after a certain point it suddenly drops, because you realise how little you actually know. Because
This pattern basically keeps repeating, getting higher each time but also some of the drops getting lower.
It’s not quite the same thing, but the basis of something somewhat unintuitive coming from a greater amount of learning.
The X/Y axis has 4 quadrants of which the positive quadrant 1 is the person who if you get more knowledge along the X axis you get more confident along the Y axis.
The opposite is the person who is in the 3rd quadrant and ends up clueless because they don’t get the knowledge and have no confidence. In other words “Clueless.”
THe person who doesn’t acquire the knowledge, but thinks they know it all in quadrant 2. They are the arrogant, pain in the neck people that you wish would be a little more quiet and listen.
This is a different graph to the one I’m talking about. Mine has only one quadrant, and simply describes the relationship between how confident you are as you obtain more knowledge.
It starts with 0 knowledge, and 0 confidence, then at first both increase, but after a certain point, an increase in x creates a sudden decrease in y, followed by another increase in y to a higher point.
Kinda like this: http://www.makeitshareit.com/drawing/16654 (rough drawing on the first site for making that sort of drawing I could find)
But the problem with a graph of that type is that it only shows one result. The important thing I believe is to have a more in depth group of facts to show all people and all possibilities. That is the math major in me. It is also the Political Science major in me that wants all the facts.