Knowing What is Not Known

An advantage of experience and education can be the acquisition of healthy skepticism.

A person who is relatively new to the knowledge game, for example, may be greatly excited about the findings described in one book while an individual who has been around will know that although the one book may be right, there are other ones with opposite conclusions.

It often seems as if the news media writes for the first person. They live by crisis du jour and as you scan the newspaper or listen to the broadcast, you can find international crises and domestic ones and ones you should worry about when you drive, sleep, exercise, work, or eat. If you paid serious attention to them all, you'd go mad. [Another crisis!]

This does not mean, of course, that nothing is worth your enthusiasm or worry. It simply means that part of being experienced or educated is knowing what to worry about. Do you devote enormous worry to a climate problem twenty or more years down the road that has been forecast by people who cannot predict this weekend's weather? Or do you take their warnings with respect, sobriety, and the thought that they might not be entirely correct? Do you take every diet warning seriously [Coffee's bad! Coffee's good!] or do you look for a pattern?

The individual who neither knows nor understands the basis for the opposite side's position may be far more passionate than correct. They don't know what they don't know.