The More We Know, The Less We Know

I stumbled upon the “Socratic Method” one day when a kid came up to me with a smirk. To annoy me, she asked me about something and followed every answer I offered with a “why?” Soon, I ran out of answers. This relentlessly curious child had sent me spiraling into infinite regress –– it was turtles all the way down. I must have only been a year or two older than her, but much like Socrates, I realized that I didn’t really know anything. The only thing I seemed to know was that I didn’t know much. The more I knew, the less I knew.

Knowledge Gaps

Most of us believe that knowledge is built up over time –– both as an individual and as a society. Any time we discover something, it’s added to a “knowledge pile” that grows infinitely. Knowledge is limitless.

Another way of looking at knowledge is to imagine snowballs that move through time. Some pieces get outdated and left behind, some get contradicted and thrown out, and some get solidified and continue moving with us. This knowledge floating through time is permeable –– new information can flow in and out. For example, Newton’s theory of gravity gave way to Einstein’s which was more accurate. Knowledge isn’t an infinite pile, but a slow-moving snowball.

We can create new knowledge quite easily. Just count the number of words in this essay and you have a piece of information that’s new and nobody else knew about. The problem is that this information is trivial - it has no value. A common roadblock in academia and research is that people try to “fill in the gaps” of their knowledge. Thinking in terms of gaps forces us to assume that knowledge is bounded, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. However, if we believe that knowledge is infinite and will continue to be infinite, filling in a gap doesn’t mean much. There are still infinite gaps to fill.

Then again, this isn’t reason to not fill in the gaps of our knowledge. We seek knowledge to understand our world a little better, even if that means thinking of knowledge as bounded and trying to bridge those tiny gaps within the finite.

If there is to be a system of human knowledge that’s not dependent on an absolute first principle, there is no immediate certainty at all. We build our houses on the earth, the earth rests on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise again –– who knows on what? And so on until infinity. (It’s turtles all the way down, again.)

“True, if our knowledge is thus constituted, we can not alter it; but neither have we, then, any firm knowledge. We may have gone back to a certain link of our series, and have found every thing firm up to this link; but who can guarantee us that, if we go further back, we may not find it ungrounded, and shall thus have to abandon it? Our certainty is only assumed, and we can never be sure of it for a single following day.” –– Johann Gottlieb Fichte

The More You Know, The More You Know

With information available abundantly everywhere, connections are becoming the foundation of knowledge. Connections are what make knowledge useful, too. By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we’re creating a rich web of associated information. The more information we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of learning, and it seems as if our long-term memory capacity and speed are actually growing. Once we’ve started on this cycle of learning and knowledge, it often seem to run by itself –– the more we know, the more we want to know, and ultimately, the more we know.

Knowing You Know

Most experts have trouble articulating their knowledge, because they’re so in-tune with what they know –– they’ve abstracted what they know into concepts that can’t be verbalized easily. When you're a novice, you need recipes and clear guidelines. You need to be told what to do and how to do it. Experts take time to communicate well because they're functioning on intuition. They’ve perfected their craft to a point where their knowledge is an extension of their “self”.

Knowledge invites a certain kind of humility –– to know something, you have to first accept that you don’t know it. Acknowledging the novelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of it. If you know you’re an expert on some topic, you can freely admit when you learn something you didn’t know, especially because you can be confident that most other people wouldn’t know it either.

However, people who spend their time and earn their living studying a particular field produce fairly poor predictions. Following the Dunning-Kruger Effect, those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it. The person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of their skill, they think that they know more and tend to become overconfident. So, the more you know, the more you unconsciously limit yourself to new knowledge. If you’re not careful, the more you know, the less you will eventually know.

Knowing You Don't Know

We seem to have a sense of smugness and superiority whenever we encounter something alien to our ways, as well as rigid ideas about what is real or true, often forced into us by schooling or our inner circle. Expert or not, if we feel like we know something, our minds close off to other possibilities. We see reflections of the truth we have already assumed. Such feelings of superiority are often unconscious and stem from a fear of what is different or unknown. We’re rarely conscious of this, and often imagine ourselves to be impartial.

Openness in our quest for knowledge is what makes the biggest difference. Knowledge comes from understanding and accepting that we can be wrong. There are things that we may not know. The less we know, the more we know. The more we know, the less we know, and therefore the more we know.

Ignorance Is Bliss

Not everyone seeks new knowledge actively –– these people may have cracked the code. Sometimes the reason people don't know something is because they choose to not know it. When you present someone with something they didn’t already know, it could be that they didn’t want to know, usually because it contradicts some cherished belief.

(The “paradox” here is that every mistaken belief creates more ideas around it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict said cherished belief. The more you know, the more there is to know. The less you chose to know, the more you know about what you don’t know.)

The consolation: we do not need to know everything about something in order to understand it. Too many facts are often as confusing as too few.

We can’t help dealing with the limited knowledge we have as if it were all there is to know. We build the best possible story from the information available to us. If it’s a good story, we even believe it. It’s easier to construct that story when we know little –– there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. We’re convinced that the world makes sense because our knowledge is built on one secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

In Knowing All Of This

“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.⁣” –– Socrates

The more I try to understand this phenomenon of paradoxical knowledge, the more I realize that there’s so much more to it –– from psychology to education to epistemology. The more I know about this paradox of knowledge, the less I know about it. If it wasn’t confusing enough as it is: the more I know about how the more I know the less I know, the less I know. This is the infinite regress I stepped into when that kid asked me “why?” over and over again. But here’s the thing –– I know that I don’t know. So for now, knowing that I know that I don’t know seems enough.

Post-Script

This essay was the outcome of a month-long [[adventure to learn to write better]]. It could do with a lot more editing and a re-write or two before it becomes more coherent and gets to the heart of what I'm trying to say.