Am I a confident idiot ?
I
would like to agree that I'm not a confident idiot, but by saying I'm not
one….doesn't that mean I'm probably being one ?. The article mentions that 'The American
author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being
able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns
out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve' I'd like to believe that I
know what I don’t know, for example….I don’t know anything about math, math
and……..math but then again I can count to 100 and add numbers between 1-10….I
mean that’s pretty impressive come on !
Sadly, if I were to analyse myself
truthfully I most certainly am a confident idiot. In fact when I was younger, I
had no problem acting like I knew everything when actually all I knew for
certain was that you should never talk to strangers and not to eat food off the
ground…well because that’s disgusting! Even currently I feel that I tend to
overestimate my knowledge on topics that I have only touched on. But even
though one is simply scraping the surface of those topics, don’t you still know
something about them ? Or am I just being a confident idiot ?
I think as
human beings we stretch our knowledge because we hate the feeling of not
knowing. We'd rather make something up and tell ourselves that we know
everything than admit that we actually know nothing and that we are just a
speck of dust in the universe. If you really think about it, if you were to
disappear from the earth nothing would really change, I mean your family and
friends would be affected but the world wouldn’t end just because you're gone
and that fact scares people. It scares people to know just how unnoticed we
actually are and somehow people just don’t want to accept that, we want the
whole world to know who we are so we try to make ourselves stand out and be
more superior by showing our intellect and knowledge. We are all trying to
prove something…. the only problem is that everyone is ….so really we are actually proving nothing.
We as humans
don’t like to feel insignificant and for that reason we try to show that we are
important than others by saying we have all this knowledge that no one else
has. All we want to do is stand out…even if that means claiming to know about
the scientific concepts of 'plates of parallax, ultra-lipid,
and cholarine.' so yes, I most certainly am a confident idiot and so are
you.
Excellent post. When I was working on my dissertation I came to understand just how little I know, even about areas in which I am supposedly an expert...
ReplyDelete