“This intolerance of ignorance threatens to sever both policy makers and ordinary people from reality, harming our best chance at improving our world — scientific knowledge combined with careful, open-minded moral thinking.”
Indeed, this is one of the most frustrating things going on in the world today (and yes, I also fall victim to it and struggle to avoid doing so): people who know absolutely nothing about what they speak, claiming that they know anyway, or that facts are irrelevant, or that inconvenient facts are wrong because they don’t want to believe them, etc.
It should be OK to admit that we don’t know something, and if someone clearly is more knowledgeable on a subject, we need to open our minds to the possibility that we’re wrong.
I’ve recently had a number of conversations about the value of expertise. People who don’t know anything about a subject – shouldn’t be the ones leading on it. Period. Or at the very least, they need to surround themselves with people who are intimately familiar with it so as to have a solid knowledge base. That’s why I worry so much about Drumpf’s Cabinet picks – most of them are ignorant of the departments which they’ve been selected to lead, and that’s a problem, not an opportunity. A lack of knowledge means that you don’t even know how little you know……or how much you don’t know that you don’t know, as Rumsfeld so famously said (and he was right about it, too).