I made a deal with myself a long time ago, my primary value:
I’d rather know than be happy.
Reality is cold and bleak. We have so many social constructs meant to obfuscate that fact. I wouldn’t change my values, but they aren’t a path to a shiny, happy life, and blissful ignorance values are among the biggest reasons our civilization’s outlook is so bleak.
A CEO has no desire to see how those they laid off are doing months later, or the children they hurt polluting a water source, or their own current employee’s subsistence living conditions despite the revenue they generate. They should have to see the pain they’ve caused to line their pockets, as should shareholders who applied pressure in willful ignorance for maximum profit(bliss), but ignorance is bliss.
Which is why, though alluring, the bliss of willful ignorance is a dangerous and antisocial value to live by.
where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise
I feel the same way.
The “stuff you know” slice should be “stuff you think you know,” and “stuff you know” should be a tiny sliver.
It’s fun asking kids, if 100 is knowing everything and zero is knowing nothing, how much do you know? And they’ll answer something like 80 or 90.
Then you ask them how many words they know in the dictionary. Then you ask how many words they know in other languages. And then they realise they don’t know much at all and agree the answer is something more like 0.0000000000001. (needs more zeros)
And you could even argue that we can’t really know if we can know anything, because we don’t know if we are objective observers of the universe.
We can make it as philosophical as we want. Do you know that you can know anything with certainty?
The mind is a mindfuck.
So, you’re saying I know something.
Even if you know nothing, that’s something.
Well, if all you know is that you know nothing, you do know something … and you’re wrong about it.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
- Isaac Newton
Not to scale.
So you’re saying my anxiety is justified, when do I start feeling the bliss?
The problem is there’s a fog of war like veil over the things you know called “things you don’t know you know”.
For people like myself with anxiety, I look out and I see all the things I don’t know, yet the things I do know are nearly invisible, making it feel like I know nothing despite being highly qualified and good at what I do.
How do you know how much i don’t know that i don’t know?
This pie chart thinks way, way too highly of me.
Dont tell me what I don’t know I don’t know!
Depends on what you take as “knowledge”. The kind of “What’s the name of person X in India” or the kind with understanding?
It doesn’t matter. Either way our knowledge is microscopic compared to what there is to know.
There’s so many things I don’t know.
Like cheese, you know.
This chart is the very first thing they show you at The Landmark Forum. They even tried to copyright it…
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
— some asshole who was unfortunately also intelligent
Yeah. Too many people these days speak in absolutes with no interest in diving into the unknown.
The stuff I know slice should be microscopic in my case.
Speak for yourself
