Whaddaya know?

A lot of political dialog keeps bumping up against the limits of what we can know. For example, people talk confidently about President Obama's innermost thoughts and motivations, as if they're telepaths (the same happened with President Bush of course).

We can--and should--make inferences from politicians' actual behavior. But only the incompetent are so delusional about the reach of their minds that they think they can divine others' actual thoughts.

Likewise, few of us are experts on economics, military science, climate science etc. Still, we can--and should--have our reservations about anything the experts tell us. But to casually dismiss the experts' consensus about something would be laughable if it weren't true for so many voters.

This is also true in the workplace. Inferior workers consistently overestimate their skills and contributions, while the best workers tend to be hard on themselves. Talking about this gets us into epistemology--theory of knowledge.

Obviously we can never know anything for sure. Some people use this as an excuse to deny the possibility of knowledge, thus giving them license to do whatever they feel like.

But to me this is romanticism at its worst. The airliner you fly in was built from millions of parts, designed and assembled by experts who stood on the shoulders of human civilization’s efforts in the past, all the way back to the person who, tens of thousands of years ago, invented the wheel. That airplane wasn’t created by people who thought we can’t know anything. And modern airliners have a safety record so good we should be astonished at humans' ability to make such complex machinery reliable.

At the same time the Titanic was designed and built by people who thought we can know everything, so to speak. Their hubris and greed (sending it on a dangerous route because it was the most profitable) killed hundreds of people.

So human knowledge must carve a middle path between the silliness of claiming that we can’t know anything and the hubris of claiming that we can achieve absolute knowledge.

That’s why I’ve spent a lot of time studying the forces and structures that stand in the way of us actually perceiving reality as clearly as it’s possible for us to do so. It requires a mixture of confidence and humility that’s extremely hard to attain, much less maintain. But for anyone serious about their existence, it’s a vital goal.

Here's an example of something that defied what I thought I knew. I'm a parent and once taught elementary school. I think I know what a 10 year old child is and isn't capable of. Then I saw this.

And no, the kid isn't lip-synching. That's the real thing. (My review of her first album is here.)

So I always leave open the possibility of being amazed...of having to rethink something I'd been sure of.