You are Ignorant and Here is Why

We live in days where the internet if abundant with self taught experts of any field. Fueled by information accessibility, many fall into the trap of thinking of knowing more than they actually do. This phenomenon is not limited to uneducated denizens of the net. People with higher education and even scholars are susceptible to it. It is called the Dunning-Krueger effect. Quite ironically, I am far from being an expert in psychology, yet here I am imparting psychology lessons upon the world by referencing an article from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a vast body of knowledge with a relatively high quality of content. Well, at least when compared to, let’s say, a blog. It’s size is an indicator of things that we as individuals do not know. Before trying to comprehend the size of Wikipedia, let’s have a look at the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is the largest printed encyclopedia with 32,640 pages in total over 30 volumes.

If we were to print the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a single page, that page would be more than 10km long

Wikipedia is significantly larger than Encyclopaedia Britannica. 85 times larger to be precise. Wikipedia has 6.2 million articles for a total of 3.7 billion words, and that is just the English version of it.

If you want to read the English version of Wikipedia spending one hour per day and finish by the end of the year, you should start before the Spanish inquisition (period, not article).

On the other hand, if you prefer a more leisurely reading pace at one article per day, it would take you 16 thousand years. That means you should have started during the Upper Paleolithic.

You might assume that Wikipedia holds most of human knowledge, but you would be wrong. Wikipedia is just an overview of most human knowledge.

Taking only scientific papers published since 1665 we end up with a body of knowledge 66 times larger than Wikipedia.

In fact we just recently crossed the 50 million mark of published scientific papers. If you read at an unrealistic pace of one scientific paper per day, it would take you 136 thousand years to finish.

Next time you are under the impression you are an expert of a subject area where you haven’t spent several years of intensive research, you better think again while keeping in mind those 136 thousand years it would take you to catch up with everything you don’t know.