at one time I was doing an assessment of all I knew about the engineering business, in by broad experience and many years solving complex problems... it was a pretty long list. some recruiter had asked for a list. Then I parsed the list to areas that I was 100% with no doubt at all certain of... as time wore on it turned out that the longer I looked I could find no area that I was 100% certain of in all aspects...there were thousands of things I wasnt certain of...for instance I had no faintest idea of what alloy was used in the babbit bearings on a 1912 studebaker.... none. I had no clue. (another example would be 'steel beams'...I knew a lot about steel beams but as it turned out didnt know much about the metalurgy of all 50,000 different types of steel, milling processes and the crystalization, tempering and welding effects... It turned out that on a scale of absolutes that I was more or less a complete idiot on the topic of steel beams... finally it turned out that any shop foreman in any stieel mill would know more than I knew about steel bearms. I had been deluding myself. and I noticed the more self deluded i was the more firmly I defended what I thought I knew. ... thats because the 100 things you do know seem like a lot in vacuum of all you have no faintest clue is even an issue. ) as time wore on I noticed that even iin areas I was retained for as an expert, that at absolute levels, or even reasonably rudimentary levels that I was a long ways from a rocket scientist.. I was in fact by almost any standard an idiot. Looking deeper I found I actually did not know even what an Iron atom actually was... I thought I knew because I got a AA+ in chemistry (got all the extra test questions etc)...but in actuality as you break it down, I did not know what an electron was...and as it turned out no one on earth had actually figured that out either....we were largely clueless.... we only understood the atom at ruidimentary and sometimes functional levels....and not at all at quantum physics levels.... and we still have no clue about all the force involved and what is a particle and what is a wave and why they seem to respond to ones considerations. we have no faintest clooo. So then examiing the other broad aspects of my life and the lives of others it became real to me that on a scale of absolutes those of us living today are absolute morons .... even in a majority of cases, we are morons as compared to physicists like Maxwell who lived in the late 19th century, and Tesla who lived a bit later...we are still discovering how far these in advance of our current thinking and we have 10,000 times the instrumentation and telescopes etc. as humans were are duller than a load of plaster. *** thats my view... and its been fruitful. I tell my clients that.... I tell them 'I am dumber than a load of plaster'. but that there is hope as ya'll have some parts of the puzzle I don't, and I have a few you don't and with the assumption that we are mostly wrong we will jointly discover some things no-one knew before perhaps. thats the nature or research.... being ruthlessly skeptical about what you think might be right. and together if we dont fight we can make progress... especially if we do not get defensive about our own load of plaster. That works like greased lightening. It is fixed ideas and defending ones own stunning levels of faux brilliance that precludes real advance and locks the person into his cave man level of advance....(as compared for instance to what will be going on in just a few more decades or centuries). we mistake concrete knowledge such as turn the wheel right to drive the cutter into the piece... thats generally absolute in some applications, but is rudimentary knowledge...we mistake that for a broader understanding. I sticks a person in the pits. That is why I do not defend my own stunning levels of absolute perfection and brilliance...because doing so is fraud and the defence locks me into the error... limitations and etc. I have seen that in spades over the years. The more adamant I get about a thing, the more error.) Instead I look for how others, especially those in obvious error are right in some aspect or the other, and these are right in one aspect or the other, as I am always right in some aspect or the other ...even if its only 1% right (which is about average) and 99% wrong. by that tactic one can advance. Phil scott
