My Personal Journey Towards the Awareness of Ignorance
During my secondary education the statement “For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing…” from the Apology of Socrates by Greek philosopher Plato appeared in various guises, in English and Latin lessons, then later in philosophy lessons as “I know that I know nothing”. At that time this claim was not quite obvious to me, or rather the opposite: don’t we learn a lot going through our education system from primary school up to university, learning every day and gaining some knowledge at an astonishing rate? We do know something, how can that be nothing? And aren’t we gaining confidence as we achieve some knowledge and competence? This story is about my personal journey to the awareness of my personal ignorance, hence confirming Socrates’ words in the end.
Evolution and Perception of Personal Knowledge
Extrapolating from the learning rate at school I was at first quite confident that an individual can obtain considerable knowledge through persistent effort, working towards and aspiring to an ideal of the 19th century, the “Universalgelehrte”, the polymath, following the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. My world view then contained one important element (as it does now to a certain degree): the pursuit of Truth. In that view it is an objective and a virtue to acquire an understanding of the world, to build models, mental representations that describe the workings of this world and all its constituents.
As I continued to learn about many subjects during and after my university years I believed that I did already understand quite a lot and that I was on the right path. I felt confident in my domain (Mechanical Engineering) as well as in many other fields due to a general eduction and communicating with people from different domain such as medicine or economics. This was in my late twenties — early thirties. With the benefit of hindsight, however, all along I had probably been climbing up and was about to reach the peak of “mount stupid” as identified by the Dunning-Kruger effect: knowledge in some domains, but largely ignorant, yet with lots of confidence, a dangerous combination¹.
Eventually, once I begun to realise that with all my education and having read a few books on some subjects I only had scratched the surface, I was coming down from “mount stupid” into the “valley of despair”. There was and is so much to be known still; a disheartening and awakening realisation. Nevertheless, I remained confident that knowledge and competence continues to increase as long as I persist putting in enough effort. So, don’t give up: it should still be possible to make it out of “valley of despair”, then climb up the “slope of enlightenment” towards the “plateau of sustainability” and wisdom. The underlying assumption was that, given time and effort, a certain state of confidence can be achieved; this state would be supported by knowledge and competence in many fields.
In my current view, after a few more decades of experience and learning, the real situation turned out to be different. Every time I started studying a new domain, I realised that I am only at a beginning; I get a glimpse into what can be known. Some people may go through the Dunning-Kruger trajectory in selected areas very quickly and may gain indeed competence with confidence in that field. On a larger scale, however, that knowledge is still only a fraction of what can be known in that field as well as on a whole (see next section). To make matters worse, the human mind is not an infallible accumulator of time-invariant knowledge. Rather, competence is not increasing monotonically through life but appears to be decreasing for various reasons from a certain stage in one’s life:
- Forgetfulness. My mind behaves like a leaky bucket: initially nearly empty it accumulates knowledge quickly and the level rises; more knowledge is being added than being lost. As one gets older, leaks appear and, similarly to a real bucket, as the level rises, the pressure rises and more knowledge seems to be oozing out. Despite all continued efforts of learning something every day, more is lost over the same period: net loss.
- Obsolescence. The most intense learning phase happens usually during school and university; yes, we do in general continue to train and learn, but some of the knowledge acquired some time ago may loose its value, its relevance or validity, become obsolescent; hence the practical competence decreases while some foundations still remain.
- Insignificance. As time goes by books and scientific papers are being written, in one owns domain as well as in many others. Therefore, even if one might be an apparent expert in a domain for a brief period, in a wider scope, that knowledge and competence is still insignificant. See the quantification further down.
That said, the result is more like this: while we do go through the phases as shown above, from a certain point in live competence might actually start to decrease. Perhaps only a Large Language Model could ingest the entirety of human knowledge expressed in books and keep that “knowledge”. Depending on the field, a human might be able to maintain a state of competence with confidence in a narrow area. In most domains as well as in general knowledge, however, a conscious human will realise that even some knowledge is still very little in a larger sense, far from a deep understanding of the world; the person will gain awareness of ignorance.
Decades after having learned about Socrates for the first time, I have finally come to understand that Socrates was right after all: it is only very little we can know and understand about this world; it is even very little humankind can known about this world, too. I became alas aware of my ignorance².
Quantification of Personal Ignorance
So how much can be known universally and how does knowledge evolve? It is difficult to quantify, but for a start, books and scientific papers represent to an extent the knowledge humans have accumulated thus far as a proxy and will be able to acquire. Let’s consider for instance the number of book titles per million people and year as shown in the following chart for a small selection of countries. For instance, for the UK, about 66 million inhabitants and 2200 titles per million would yield about 145,200 book titles being published per year. As for the entire world, according to Number Of Books Published Per Year, “The total number of new book titles released annually is around 4 million.”
Using the above graph and data about world population growth, one could sum up all book titles ever published; with 4 million book titles per year now, and some exponential growth in the past, my initial estimate would be in the order of a few hundred million book titles, perhaps a billion, i.e. in the order of 10⁹. Since the exponential growth can be expected to continue for a while the total number of book titles accrued would grow exponentially, too, perhaps about a 10-fold increase for every 100 years.
Of course, every book title does not automatically mean innovation or gain in knowledge. There is redundancy but the number of book titles can give at least some indication of knowledge gain. On the other hand, there are scientific and technical publications; per definition, each publication is expected to add some novelty, more than with books. The number of scientific and technical papers are increasing, too, as the following graph shows. In total, Number of Academic Papers Published Per Year claims that there about 5 million of those per year.
Where does that leave an individual, the ratio of what can be known now or in the future to have can be known by a single person? A quick google search reveals that an average person reads about 10 books per year, say about 500–1000 books in a total live span? In relation to the number of book titles and scientific publications which are of the order of billions, that is very little, next to nothing.
Indeed, I know that I know nothing.
- While most people reach the mount stupid at an early phase of their life and sooner or later descend into the valley of despair, some people actually stay there, possibly in one case. If they are successful at the time being on mount stupid, due to a combination of some work, being audacious and a good deal of luck. Taking full credit for the success and gradually being surrounded by yes-men, they tend to remain confident but mostly ignorant, even start to roll out their audacity to other domains.
- The realisation of the limits of knowledge gain is saddening, as I have been eager to learn, understand and experience so much in this world in the time given to me. Yet, there is only a tiny fraction I will be able to absorb, let alone keep in my mind, and even that is waning unless I transmit some of it to the next generation. Therefore, I content myself to incremental knowledge gain these days as a factor to happiness. While an high absolute state of competence is desirable, perhaps it is the sum of all incremental knowledge gains over a life time that matters, all contributing to some understanding. Therefore, I am now happy if I have the impression that understood something or some aspects of some matter one day, knowing that a few days later I may have forgotten all the details.
