Learning to Love Wisely

Rather, learning to love ignorance wisely.  Here are some thoughts that I found in Brain Pickings for November 25, 2012.  They stimulated my mind.

The cult of expertise – whose currency are static answers – obscures the very capacity for cultivating a thirst for ignorance:

There are a lot of facts to be known in order to be a professional anything – lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, teacher. But with science there is one important difference. The facts serve mainly to access the ignorance… Scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but minuscule, but rather on what they don't know…. Science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it. Mucking about in the unknown is an adventure; doing it for a living is something most scientists consider a privilege.

[…]

Working scientists don't get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don't care all that much for facts. It's not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that they don't see them as an end in themselves. They don't stop at the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out. Facts are selected, by a process that is a kind of controlled neglect, for the questions they create, for the ignorance they point to.

What emerges is an elegant definition of science:

Real science is a revision in progress, always. It proceeds in fits and starts of ignorance.

I believe th4se come from Stuart Firestein's book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science.   Let's think about this a moment.

First, note that Persuasive, intentional ignorance is rampant.  Politicians debunk global warming with only opinionated pseudo-science to fuel their rhetoric.  Conservatives of various stripes hate birth control without any thought of the impact unwanted and unplanned pregnancies have not only on the lives of the parents but on the world at large.  White supremacists hate blacks, Jews, Latinos and people of Asian descent.  Loving this kind of ignorance is unwise, to say the least. 

But loving what we do not know for the sake of searching out new knowledge, new possibilities, new opportunities could be wise.  I think this is a wise way to love ignorance, and true scientists make great lovers.  (Many with a scientific education are hacks, and have no love of ignorance at all.)

What do you think?  Leave a comment and share with the rest of us.