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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Might be of help to some here.
A neuroscientist explains the problem of ignorance and how we can fight it [rawstory.com]

The great paradox of modern times is that we have access to more information than ever, but ignorance seems to be growing.

People in the United States and around the world believe more bogus theories now than they did 10 years ago. Comment sections on social media reveal that most people are just as gullible as ever, and in some ways, even more likely to believe outlandish things. This ignorance has consequences of global importance, because an increase in ignorance will lead to ignorant people getting elected to positions of power. I don’t think I need to give an example here because you’re probably already thinking it.

Ignorance spreads like a virus if we don’t actively combat it. But we can’t attack the problem if we don’t fully understand it. Therefore, let’s learn about what ignorance is from a scientific and philosophical perspective, then plot a course for inoculating against it.

First, we should understand that we’re all ignorant — to some degree. You could say that ignorance is a fact of life. To understand why, we have to understand the nature of life. For an organism to exist in the world, it has to accomplish certain survival goals. For example, it must be able to find food and avoid threats in a chaotic and often unpredictable world. These tasks require that the organism have a map or model of its environment.

Because humans live in a complex physical and social world, we have very sophisticated mental models of the world. But as incredible as those maps of the world are, they are still abstract, simplified representations of a much more complicated reality. And they really have to be — a map that is as complicated as the thing it is mapping wouldn’t be very useful because it would contain more information than we could process. Scientists and artificial intelligence researchers are very aware of this point. They often remark that “the map is not the territory,” and there is a common saying that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

This idea has been summarized as the “Principle of Incomplete Knowledge,” and it says that because our mental model of the world always contains some uncertainty or error, we all have a certain amount of ignorance.

Detailed practical instructions follow.

Original Submission