by Chris McGinty
There’s this thing called the Dunning Kruger effect. The short version is that people who hardly know anything about a subject overestimate how much they know while people who are experts in the subject are a little bit more clued into how little they know. The point where I suspected that I might be a little bit more widely read than your average person was the point I realized that there was so much knowledge out there I will simply never get to.
I know that when I was younger I believed things like I could listen to every album in existence eventually, or read a large percentage of the books that have been written, but it became very clear to me; partially, thanks to the internet, there’s a lot more stuff out there than I realize.
I really do try to have a at least a surface level understanding of things, but it’s really difficult. I think one reason why this might be is because we have to usually take numerous passes at learning something before it clicks and is properly committed to memory.
Anyway I feel like this kind of fits into the not so deep thoughts file. It seems like this might be the kind of thing that a lot of people never realized for real in their lives, and I even question as to whether or not I’ve ever actually realized this for real myself. I mean have I really actually grasped just exactly how much knowledge I will never know, just because I realized that it’s a lot?