On Knowledge

Having completed an MBA years ago where I had the chance to absorb a load of knowledge on the corporate world I came to realize in subsequent years that no matter what knowledge you acquire through experience, reading books, self-reflection and so on….and no matter how hard you try to acquire new one, knowledge that you don’t have is and will be infinitely greater that the knowledge you do have, very simple but can be of a profound implications. This reminds me of the story told by Nassim Taleb on Umberto Eco’s library which consisted of more than thirty thousand books and the realisation that unread books are far more valuable that read books which he coined as the antilibrary.

As the pace of life in constantly increasing with more and more stuff happening every day acquiring new knowledge requires building a humility shield to get us immune to taking it too seriously and also acknowledging our ignorance that should be proportionate to knowledge acquisition. Failing to do this leads to platonifying all we see and do and apply it to what we don’t see, but this is no easy. As a human being we have the natural tendency to jump into conclusions that fit our way of thinking and makes the idea easy to process and understand. The problem of induction developed by the philosopher Hume crystalizes this very natural behaviour. It is at the very heart of scientific reasoning. Karl Popper the philosopher of science was the one who truly defined what science is and what is not “falsifiable”. To put it simply, a lot of things that we encounter in life and business are merely experiences, stories, noise, aesthetics and few, very few belong to the realm of a true knowledge or “SCIENCE”

Fortunately there are some people, mainly practitioners in the real world who not only came to the same conclusion through experimentation and wisdom but most importantly made it their mantra. The key to a fruitful life is not what you know, it’s what you don’t know and how you handle it. In a complex and ever changing world where we are bombarded with all kind of information, knowing this is a matter of survival.