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The Fever Of Phineas

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  What you know, and what you don’t know.

  Posted: April 1st, 2008, 6:23pm EDT by Phineas

  
  There’s what you know, and what you don’t know, and how you feel about it.
  
  I feel pretty good about what I know. I know a lot of stuff. Tons of stuff I’ve learned or observed or memorized, almost all of it basically or potentially useful. Of course, it happens that something you think you know turns out to be wrong, or flawed or incomplete. Often the discovery that you were wrong about something sucks, or is embarrassing or whatever. But for me, most of the time, I’m pretty OK with revising my knowledge. It’s a pleasure to learn. And being open minded about correcting one’s errors makes you smarter and wiser and more confident in what you do know, or think you know. It’s been vetted, through this continual process of discovery and revision. Stubborn mindedness is a problem not only because it’s unpleasant for other people to deal with, but also because it means the compendium of knowledge you’ve acquired is highly suspect. It has not been vetted, so you’re likely to have incorrect, unchallenged propositions resting upon other incorrect propositions, resulting a really skewed and probably stupid world view.
  
  So, hurray for the curious, and onions to the stubborn and stupid.
  
  Then there’s what you don’t know. I feel really, really bad about what I don’t know. I hate feeling ignorant. I hate it when my ignorance is perceptible by others. I hate that struggling sensation when you try to understand something but it’s just beyond your ability. Like when you’re learning a new skill — a foreign language or a programming language or how to fix your plumbing. I hate when I find myself dependent on others to do something I feel I ought to be able to do myself (like hiring a plumber or asking a friend how to tune your computer). This problem is the bane of my career. I know a lot of shit, but no matter how much you know, there’s so much more to learn that other people already have. I spend a lot of time researching, preparing, planning so I will go to meetings ready. I can wing it a lot of the time because a lot of the time I’m in my area of expertise. But it often happens there’s overlap, and there’s all that stuff I know plus one thing I don’t that the other people do. I often feel like I didn’t get the memo. Frustrating.
  
  I suppose it would probably be better to be more OK with what I don’t know, seeing as there’s a whole universe of stuff I don’t know and never will. Maybe other people are aware of what they don’t know and are OK with it. I could learn from them. But I’m suspicious of people who go too easy on themselves in this department.