MarkPNeyer.com

We live in a culture that hates ignorance. We are told to educate ourselves about Darfur, Global Warming, Fossil Fuels, Stem Cells, and every other issue of the day. This is absolutely terrible advice, and probably causes far more harm than good.

The volume of knowledge produced by western civilization in the past hundred years alone is simply astonishing. No person could possibly be expected to be aware of it all, much less understand or comprehend it. Even in a single field, like mathematics, it’s impossible for one person to understand everything. Take an expert topologist and a smart undergrad, and put them both through a class on number theory. It’s a tossup on who’ll do better. Hell, I’d probably bet on the undergrad, because there’s a chance she’s actually interested in number theory. Is the topologist ignorant of number theory? Yes. Is this a bad thing? I certainly don’t think so. No reasonable mathematician would look down upon the topologist for not knowing much about an area in which she isn’t trained. She would certainly be criticized, however, if she presented herself as understanding number theory even though she didn’t. Among mathematicians, Ignorance is fine, as long as you’re aware that you’re ignorant and don’t try to disguise the fact.

Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t adhere to the same standard as mathematicians; Ignorance is roundly criticized as a ‘bad’ thing, to be ‘fought’ with ‘knowledge.’ Global Warming is a perfect example. Ask anyone whether the earth is getting warmer, and they’ve probably got an answer for you. Do they understand what they’re really saying? Not a chance in hell, unless they’ve done serious study in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and climatology. That certainly doesn’t stop people from forming opinions about subjects that they fundamentally don’t understand. It doesn’t really matter if people spout nonsense about number theory (although it might bother the number theorists.) But when people start forming opinions and voting based upon science that they fundamentally don’t understand, bad things happen. If global warming is really a problem, all the people who are convinced that it isn’t are standing in the way of fixing it. If global warming isn’t a problem, all the people who claim that it is are poised to inflict serious damage to the economy.

I’m not saying that Global Warming isn’t happening – I’m saying I’m not qualified to answer that question, and neither is 99.9% of the population. Unfortunately, it seems like many people who aren’t qualified to answer the question have decided to so. Take a stand for ignorance – accept that you understand very little of the world outside your area of expertise, and be proud of this! I’d much rather live in a culture of ignorant people who are aware of their ignorance than a culture of ignorant people who consider themselves to be educated.

I wrote a post on the morality of different career choices, and got a lot of responses. I was trying to come up with a reasonable metric of measuring the extent to which someone increased the overall amount of hapiness in the world. The idea was to compute a delta function – how much less happy would everyone be if this person didn’t exist?

Many readers, both here and on facebook, astutely pointed out a lot of problems in my analysis. I gave it a lot more thought, and concluded that ‘how much is person X helping the world?’ is really a meaningless question. In order to answer the question, you’d have to be able to say ‘what would happen’ if person X wasn’t engaged in their career of choice. To do that, you’d have to have an accurate analytical model of the entire world. Nobody’s got one of those.

If you can’t answer the question “how much am I realy helping the world,” how can you decide upon a career that helps the world out the most? I’ve concluded that this is really a meaningless goal. The best metric you have of happiness is your own – if something makes you happy, go for it. If it doesn’t make you happy, then you should maybe try to find something else. If you’re strictly logical about it, you can’t really answer questions about what kind of ‘difference’ you are making in the world, so you might as well not bother. Questions like ‘what if everybody acted this way’ become really meaningless when you think intensively about what they mean.

Am I advocating selfishness? Perhaps. I think people are usually hardwired to enjoy helping others. I know I feel great any time I help a stranger, even if it’s something simple like holding the door open for someone with a lot of baggage, or helping someone carry a peice of furniture to their apartment. I generally do these things instinctively, not becuase I’m some kind of ‘good person,’ but because I know I’ll feel good afterwards. I think people who are selfish and never help others are they way becuase they’ve never really experienced the rush of helping someone who needed it. I don’t volunteer in soup kitches because I don’t think I’d enjoy it. Some people do – if so, well hey, more power to you. I’m happy making the world of my experience a little better in small ways.

In summary, if you want to make the world a ‘better place’, just go out and do whatever the hell you want to do. You’ll make it a better place for you, at least. If you live in a community of people who share similar desires, you’ll make it a better place for the rest of your community as well. Once you start to ask questions about making the world as a whole better, you run into some serious logical problems. As with amost anything interesting, our logical faculties just aren’t equppied to answer questions like “How can I best serve the world?”