The Older I Get, the More There Is To Know

A good friend successfully defended her doctoral dissertation yesterday. (Congratulations!) That got me thinking about the old adage:

When you finish your BA, you think you know everything; when you finish your MA, you realize how much you don't know; when you finish your PhD, you realize that no one else knows very much either.

This is not to say that people don't learn as they go through life -- they certainly do. I know more stuff know than I did, say, 20 years ago.

At the same time, the amount of stuff that I don't know has exponentially expanded. If your goal is to "know everything" about a subject or a field, you are fighting a losing battle.

The possible exception to this might be that tiny subset of folks who creating an entirely new field, but even there, as soon as there are a couple of people working on it who don't interact regularly, you will probably not know everything that currently happening. And, to the extent that a new field builds on an old one, you probably don't know the entirety of the field on which it builds.

This does not mean that learning is futile or that our eternally incomplete knowledge is a death knell for progress. This is obviously not the case. For most people, more knowledge (than we had before) and more experience (than we had before) can help us be more effective (than we were before), even if we know less and less of the total knowledge out there with each passing year.