Why Knowing Things is Overrated

By Gil Maruvada, Senior

Yeah, I’m sure you didn’t expect this from me, but I think knowing things is overrated. Look, I know a number of things, but I think it’s far more helpful not to know things; honestly, most of the time you can scrape by just guessing. 

I’m not going to advocate pretending you know more than you do through blind guesswork, but what I am saying is that knowledge in an absolute sense is entirely overrated. Let me give an example: say you’re trapped in a maze–what’ll help you more, knowing exactly how to get out, or how to solve mazes in general? Of course, the exact instructions will get you out faster, but let’s say you’re in a different maze now; well, you’re going to wish you had chosen the more general knowledge. See, that’s what I mean when I say that knowing things is overrated; knowing a lot about a little is sometimes worse than knowing a little about a lot. Everything is connected. If you understand those connections well enough you can understand them on the fly in your head, even if you don’t “know” exactly what they are.

Knowing things has absolutely nothing to do with being able to figure things out. And, does knowing things have any real value anyway? Well, here’s what Socrates had to say, “All I know is that I know nothing.” If Socrates didn’t know anything, what hope do we have? You never really know anything about anything. Maybe you just made it all up? Here’s an article from Nature, “Subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination“; essentially what it says is that there is a “reality threshold” at which your brain perceives something to be real, and real or imagined stimulus can sometimes cross that threshold. You know that time you could have sworn you heard a noise, or when you saw something unusual out of the corner of your eye, but when you looked, it was gone? Some might call this one of the perils of humans having an overactive imagination, but I would hazard to guess that it’s simply due to a reality that lacks sufficient stimulus. 

One of the oldest thought experiments in philosophy is the idea of a philosophical zombie; essentially what it says is that if there was a thing that wasn’t conscious in any meaningful way but reacted in the same way a conscious being did, how would you be able to tell the difference? Your friends, your family, everyone you know, and everyone you ever met, if they were all philosophical zombies, how could you tell? There isn’t even a foolproof way of knowing anyone outside of yourself is conscious. You trust what a neuroscientist says about the brain, but have you ever seen a brain? Do you know how the machinery works? the physical laws it’s based on? Of course, you don’t. You can’t be expected to know everything either. The only thing you can do is say with some confidence that something is true or false, it exists or it doesn’t. But, let’s be honest; you’ll never really know what is real and what isn’t; you’ll never really know anything. It’s all just your best guess, and that might be enough.

Now, it’s time for me to come clean. Everything in this article is a foregone conclusion I wanted to reach simply by writing the title. I just wrote the title, “Why Knowing Things is Overrated,” and then decided how the article would go. Sure, I cited sources, but only to fit conclusions I’d already drawn by the time of writing. It’s all a narrative that had been formed in my mind from figments and illusions far before any of it was written or researched. I don’t know anything. Now, you might feel betrayed by this revelation, or maybe you saw it coming, but, hey, it’s all just a guess anyway. Remember, you don’t know what you know, and doubly so for what you don’t know. And, I’ll see you later. Bye.