From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 3
We’re wiseacres:
The quality of our judgement is based on the quality of our information, and we take way too much for granted that our information is true, unbiased, complete, exhaustive, and so we don’t care to inspect and verify it and fill the gaps. And we’re so arrogant that we are not aware of it: we overestimate ourselves and we are not aware of doing it, in a vicious circle. Consequently our opinions and our vote are manipulated by controlling what information we’re fed, and we're fed intentionally, deliberately and carefully incomplete, altered, twisted information, if not utterly false.
Socrates knew he did not know, we do not know that we don’t know, because we think we know. If you surveyed the most ignorant forms of life on earth, such as a mouse or a humanoid, you would find the most amazing certainty of knowing everything there is, has been and ever will be to know. They say the devil hides in the details; he definitely relies on the fact that the least we know the more we’re convinced that we know better.
Sounds obvious, but it’s not that obvious: we may be aware that we overestimate ourselves, but hardly we can be aware of how much, how deeply, how intimately, how specifically and in what tiny detail level. We think that we have enough information: we think that that information is sound, true, realistic, complete, accurate; we think that that information is sound because we think we dug it out of a free, objective, unbiased, exhaustive quest; we think we dug it out on our own; and we think that we are wise enough to evaluate it equally well.
We fall by the book into the “know best” trap: the less one knows, the more one “knows best”.
Disheartening like thinking of the future while watching a teenager whose ingenuous arrogance prevents him from listening and sifting out and thus traps him into being unable to learn: where would the world be now if each generation were smart enough to resume from what the previous one reached, instead of wasting the most of the endeavours of both in reinventing the wheel?
