For people to be able to ask important questions, they have to have the capacity to seek, find and comprehend the answers themselves. That is, the answers are almost but not quite within their reach. The Zen proverb — when the student is ready, the teacher appears — is a version of that.
A corollary to that is the fact that one cannot learn something from a book that is not implicitly almost known already. To have a chance to gather even the low-hanging fruits, you have to be close to the tree; if you are far enough away from the tree, you can’t even see what fruits it bears.
The less one’s knowledge of a subject, the less aware one is of one’s ignorance. It’s almost paradoxical that the more you know, the more your knowledge of your ignorance grows. Ignorance of one’s ignorance is meta-ignorance. Knowledge of one’s ignorance is meta-knowledge. Continue reading “Knowledge and Ignorance”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 