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ignorance

How to Deal with Incompetence: The Role of Malice

July 3, 2023

Society

ignorance, responsibility, social masses, society, stupidity

You might have seen some memes going around claiming “Idiots, everywhere!” or something of the sort. As George Carlin famously said, imagine how dumb the average person is, then realize half of them are even dumber. But to deal with incompetence (which isn’t quite the same as stupidity, which isn’t quite the same as ignorance), we need to also take something else into consideration: the role of malice.

There is a world of difference between an incompetent person who, still, has good intentions, and one who is malevolent. In other words, the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is seriously misleading.

Why?

But because benevolent incompetence will want to rectify its repercussions, whereas malevolent will not even recognize there is a problem.

Let’s try to categorize all this and come up with a theoretical framework, to see where (if anywhere!) it gets us.

deal with incompetence cats
“Let me handle this, Jim” (as I’ve said before, whenever I don’t want to spend much time finding a more suitable image, you get a cat; this time, you get two)
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Is Knowledge Always Desired?

May 15, 2023

Philosophy, Society

change, ignorance, knowledge, philosophy, self-deception, society

“Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was”, the creature in Frankenstein utters, summarizing one of the core themes in Mary Shelley’s novel. The meaning is inescapable for the hapless being: Knowledge is not always desired. The question is whether that could apply to us all and why.

Let me confess it right away: Knowledge is something I am nearly obsessed about. That is, I feel very stressed if I don’t know something, and much calmer if I do, even if it’s knowledge of something unpleasant. If someone asked me “There’s good news and bad news, do you prefer…” I’d interrupt them with “Oh, spit it out all together already!”

However, I also have enough life experience (a milder way of saying I’m becoming a grumpy old man) to know that this approach doesn’t necessarily apply to others. People like self-deception.

The truth is, we intuitively might think knowledge is always desired, we might even affirm so if asked, but things are more complex than that.

knowledge always desired
There are too many books and not enough time to read them (I’m sure you can relate), so, to begin with, there are practical considerations in limiting knowledge intake
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The Danger of Partial Knowledge: My ChatGPT Encounter

March 13, 2023

Philosophy, Society

ignorance, knowledge, programming, society, technology

The old piece of wisdom might be right: It’s better to know nothing about something, rather than know a little. Of course, referring to partial knowledge is a sort of misnomer. Philosophically speaking, virtually all knowledge is partial – cogito ergo sum and all that. But socially speaking, the gradations are more intriguing.

The reason? Because of our old friend, the Dunning-Kruger effect. When it comes to partial knowledge – knowing a little of something – there is a peculiar paradox at play: When we know a little, we think we know a lot; when we know more (the threshold is subjective), we know that we only know a little.

As I said above, though there are philosophical dimensions in this topic, the focus of this post will be on society. I have always been interested in ignorance and the illusion of knowledge (as long-term readers of the blog have realized), but recently I had an experience that intrigued me with its repercussions: I tried asking the famous ChatGPT AI model questions on a topic I know very well enough to know I don’t know anything: the Gothic. The responses I got were very intriguing for our context of partial knowledge.

Partial Knowledge - woman reading
The only way out of the darkness of ignorance is through personal, active effort, paired with humility: “I only know that I know nothing”
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