“We are all, in my view, condemned to float endlessly in a vast sea of unanswered questions and unknown reference points. A sea of ignorance if you will. The example that I like to use is a chessboard. How many moves ahead can you see on a chessboard? I can see about one move ahead in a chess game. If you can see three or four moves ahead in a chess game you can beat 99% of chess players. And if you can see seven or eight moves ahead you would be a world class chess champion.
Well suppose a chess board was not eight squares wide and eight squares long, but a hundred squares wide and a hundred squares long with a thousand moving pieces rather than thirty two. How far ahead could you see on the chessboard then?
The world is like a chessboard that is a million squares wide and a million squares long with hundreds of thousands of moving pieces and hundreds of thousands of different people moving them. In my view, anyone who imagines that he can anticipate what will happen next in any area of life is delusional, and people who think that “experts” should be able to do this are children and fools. If the world was 10 percent more complicated than the human mind, ... then the difference between an intelligent person’s ability to understand the word and a less intelligent person’s ability to understand the world would be very meaningful.
But since the world is billions and billions of times more complicated than the human mind, individual intelligence is almost entirely irrelevant to the understanding of the world.What is critical to understanding is humility and cooperation. What is critical to gaining more understanding of the world is to learn to accept and appreciate the vastness of our own ignorance; and to understand that one can only survive in a sea of ignorance by working with others to make our small lifeboat a little bit stronger. Only by embracing the fact of our limitless ignorance can one position oneself to increase the store of knowledge.”
-Bill James
Related idea: The I don't know school of security architecture
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