And a little understanding could make things better

Can’t we talk to the humans and work together, now?

No, because they are dead.

It’s actually quite useful to have two terms. Agood example would be climate discussion, where Unssenheit can be corrected by proper teaching technique while people who are willfully ignorant should just be contained, as trying to give them proper facts is pointless.

But lots of things in this world don’t work that way.  In my chosen sport, precision pistol (various sub-disciplines), everything you might ever want to know can be looked up online.  When you look things up, though, you don’t learn a damn thing.  You just get lots of out-of-context facts that worked for someone else or make sense in some limited sense. 

“Online” isn’t the culprit, here.  The same is true of books on the subject.  There are classics in the field.  I have them all.  I’ve read them all.  They all contradict each other and, often, themselves.

No matter how much information you look up and commit to memory, you’re still not going to understand any of those facts in the context that’s germane to your needs.  It just ain’t gonna happen.

OTOH, I spent a little over 2 days in a class recently with an 11-time world champion and the coach who taught him.  Nothing said during the class wasn’t something I couldn’t have looked up.  In fact, I don’t think anything said in that class was something I *hadn’t* looked up in the past.  The difference was that in the class, the facts were presented in the right order, at exactly the time they were needed to help me understand the confusion that the instructors knew I was about to run into. 

No facts changed.  I think I could have continued looking things up, learning, implementing, and eventually achieving all that the class provided to me.  However, I firmly believed I skipped 5 to 10 years of work and frustration by going to the class.  That’s how long I would have spent chasing things that weren’t important before figuring out I needed to go a different direction.  That’s how long it would have taken me to figure out what works.

Literally, my measured performance has improved by more than half in the 2 months since I’ve taken the class.  That’s more than I improved, working on my own, part-time, over the 20 years prior.  Granted, I recently retired so I’ve been working on my shooting full-time for those 2 months whereas for the previous 20 I was also saddled with having to make a living. 

Still, having someone *tell* me the facts (in the right order, with demonstrations and personalization of presentation) worked *so* much better than just Googling infinite out-of-context factoids and mistaking that for learning.

I said all that to say this – Generally, when someone asks something on a forum they want more than what they’re asking for.  They want some contextual understanding, not just facts for rote memorization.  They want a discussion and understanding, not just directions to the reference desk or the periodical index.  (Uh, sorry, kinda showing my age, there…)  They want to solve a problem.

I’m all in favor of looking things up but I find insufferable people who just dismissively point to “let me google that for you” instead of answering the question and then following up with a “So, what do you need this for?  Since you probably knew you could look it up, asking here probably means you’re having some difficulty to which you need to apply the information.  I can probably give you the benefit of my experience in the area if you can tell me what you’re trying to achieve.  Or, if you just want the bare facts and don’t care to discuss, just say so and I’ll be happy to point you to some links.”  (And if the answer is “Just the facts, please”, then a pointer to “let me google that…” would be perfectly reasonable.)

I thought this whole internet, connected world, we-can-all-talk-to-each-other thing was about helping people solve problems instead of just making noobs feel unwelcome.

I wonder where I got that idea?

Besides, I looked up “nescience” in a half-dozen online dictionaries as well as three of those giant, printed-on-paper-and-used-to-sit-on-a-pedestal-in-a-library dictionaries I own.  In every case, ignorance and nescience were directly interchangeable, with an occasional note the nescience was a more formal word.

Your 7th grade English teacher sounds like a bit of a jerk.

The Breaking Bad duo is clever but not intelligent.  They make a small fortune, but at what personal cost, and also walk right into avoidable situations that make everybody involved suffer.

Clever is coining phrases like “single serving friend” while stuck in a rut.
Super clever is raiding liposuction clinic trash cans and selling back the lard as ladies’ soap.
Intelligent is writing a book about it.  Selling the rights to Hollywood with Brad Pitt attached is just icing on the cake.

But, the words arnt spelld rite. I think.

There is no better way to have fun than to be the dumbest guy in the room…

I’m with you. I even have a T-shirt that says so.

The most important part of being intelligent is recognizing what you do and don’t know.  Knowing what you don’t know leaves you open to learning new things.  Thinking you know something that you don’t, doesn’t.

The author is basically alluding to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Moreover, asking “dumb” questions is crucial.  I don’t know how many times I’ve been in a room filled with well educated people who have no clue what is going on but are afraid to ask for fear that this will reveal their ignorance.  The people that would ask the “dumb” questions would eventually figure out what is going on.  The people that wouldn’t never did. 

Yeah, ignorance is a state of being uninformed.

My 7th grade English teacher insisted that we use ‘nescience’ for simple lack of knowledge and ‘ignorance’ for culpable lack of knowledge.

That sounds like a rather stupid argument.

With enough duct tape…

Intelligence is one’s capacity to learn, to think, and to reason.

Stupidity is when you fail to learn, or fail to make proper use of what you’ve learned.

Hurting yourself doing something you should know better than to do is stupid. Hurting yourself doing something you are unaware can hurt you is NOT stupid.

It’s hard to tell whether Bostick’s argument itself is stupid, or merely ignorant. He took the time to look up the definition of “stupid”, but then he applied it incorrectly. Maybe he is merely ignorant of the proper meaning of “intelligence”, in which case his accident is understandable. But if not, then the argument is stupid.