Gideon Writes

To regard partial knowledge as if it were total knowledge is to conclude with finality, act with blindness, move with fanaticism — fall into the abyss and gloating about it all the way to the fatal crash.  Only the recognition of how much you don’t know will give you the tools to turn ignorance into knowledge, and do better in whatever you are doing.

On the other end of this stretch we find the folks whose ignorance has stalled their ride, spiralled their motion, circled their logic, and while they appear in motion, they are actually treading on the same spot. 

 Where are you?  Are you overconfident, quashing your ignorance, or are you frozen by your “maybes,” drowning in your ‘further studies’, hypnotized by the uncertainty ahead?  If you are  ignorance balanced — spend your best energy keeping it that way; if you are off your ignorance balance — first find which side do you incline towards, then spend you best energy undoing the bent. 

All other risks are mitigated if you are ignorance-balance, all other errors are minimized if you are ignorance healthy.  And to the extent that you find yourself off that balance point that is the extent where either risks or errors spring galore across your path.  For my personal take:  my ignorance is my religion.

If I had missed my ignorance I would miss my sense of wonder, mystery would vanish, hope will be moot — because nothing above the expected can possibly, can prospectively come to be.  If I had my ignorance taken I would live my life as if I were watching the same movie over and over again, because knowledge of the future will match knowledge of the past, and a sense of daring and forwardness would be non-existent.  If I had missed my ignorance then all the knowledge I now miss and so possess will have to substitute for all that excitement and fear, all that uncertainty, and the tears — and offer a fitting replacement to that loss.  And when that happens I will worship the religion of comprehension — not yet for me to claim.  In the now I do have my ignorance with me like a shadow, a decree, a given, a recognition, a truth.  My ignorance is my religion and I let it loose.

I never knew how to shriek off guilt without snuffing out my inner delicate vulnerable self.  I had to, to stand up to the waves of reality, the tyranny of the urgent, the ever-growing to-do list.  But whenever I cleared my mind from that paralyzing guilt I also eradicated the tiny flame that fed on the breeze within.  Untoward.  Could not take a vacation, go to loose and slight territory because guilt will come from all directions and ghost me out into a different universe.  I prayed for this malaise to go away, it only clawed itself deeper.  After so long I simply face it off.  Will report.

Observed patterns in a body of data are normally attributed to the data source, taken as reflective of its nature.  Such inference would be proper in the case where all the spewed data is acquired by its reader.  Alas If one allows for a less than perfect detection probability then it can be shown that all observed patterns may be due to a particular data acquisition dynamics.  In fact a perfectly random source of data can be read as a source of any desired data pattern by allowing for a matching data acquisition dynamics.  The only required assumption is that the likelihood to capture and detect a piece of data increases with the increased history of reading the same data.  By applying this ‘familiarity distinction’ over a hierarchy of data readers it figures that the incidental starting pattern taken from the random source will evolve into a durable pattern wrongly attributed to that source.  This result suggests that our science and grasp of reality is due to the happenstance history of data acquisition drawn from the inanimate processes of data absorption, through the evolved particularity of the same along the Darwinian evolutionary ladder.  It also suggests that any serious attempt to see beyond our narrow tunnel of vision will have to involve a roll-back of the steps that so narrowed our vision.