Why does it feel like the more you learn the less you know?

2025-01-23

Inspiration

Is there more to this notion that the more you learn the less you feel you know?
I’ve heard it about scientists learning more about their field and then the humility that follows ask they realize how complex things actually are and how much more there is to learn and discover
I heard about this in a Reddit post about people who go to China. I don’t recall what they said exactly, but it’s as if someone goes there for a week and they leave thinking they understand everything. They stay for a few months and they realize they were wrong and have more to learn, and then there are people who spend their lives there and come to find that they would need multiple lifetimes to understand the vastness of China.

Before you get into a topic, you don’t have a way of knowing what all it involves, so you’re starting with your limited assumptions. So it makes sense that you would underestimate something’s complexity.
In my personal experience, the less education and curious people who I’ve met tend to think they “have it all figured out” or know how the world works, when it’s really the opposite. The more I learn about the world, the more I discover exists to go even deeper or wider in topics. I wanted an analogy for this, so I asked ChatGPT
- The Island of Knowledge analogy: Imagine knowledge as an island in an infinite sea of the unknown. When you’re on a tiny island (with little knowledge), your shoreline (awareness of the unknown) is small. You feel like you must know most of what there is to know. As you gain knowledge and your island grows larger, its shoreline also expands. You become more aware of the vast sea of things you don’t yet know. There is a humbling nature of intellectual growth when realizing how much more there is to explore and understand.

Also known as the Dunning-Kruger effect and the paradox of knowledge
The Duning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. It was first described by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999
There’s a general tendency to think that one is better than average. This is called illusory superiority. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a form of illusory superiority
A positive account of this effect is “ignorance is bliss”

I confused illusory superiority with the law of averages, but that’s when people think that a number or event is “due” because he hasn’t happened yet, as in gambling