A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring…
— “A Little Learning”, Alexander Pope
I encountered this line in a high school English class, and it stuck with me. To this day I remain constantly surprised by the number of people with some cursory knowledge of a subject who speak with the swagger and pomp of experts.
Most are familiar with this concept as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias demonstrated by researchers in 1999 showing that those with limited competence tend to overestimate their abilities. While I’m sure Alexander Pope would’ve appreciated experimental results to bolster his intuition, he definitely phrased it best.
If you study a subject at any level of depth, the full extent of your ignorance quickly becomes clear. When you’re inexperienced you see the field at a distance, one amorphous blob to be conquered, and this is where most people remain, which is why moms assume their programmer sons have mastery over the general category of computers and are thus ideal candidates to troubleshoot any and all printer issues. But with time you gain a more intimate perspective, and all the little details come into focus. And you realize that with human limitations on energy and attention, you could only hope to master a few things. If you’re in computer science, maybe you become an expert in cryptography, and your knowledge of data structures or distributed systems is only so-so. After this brutal lesson in humility, the unearned confidence of the novice is grating.
But I’ve learned to give space for delusion and appreciate its utility. Delusion allows us to approach the impossible, and this is invaluable. The recently en vogue GPU king and leather jacket aficionado, Jensen Huang, said he would never have started Nvidia if he’d known how hard it would be. But, his story is just one of many, and I’m sure a great deal of human progress is owed to men who initially thought some gargantuan, world-shaking task would be a walk in the park. So, now if I meet someone actually trying to build, not just chat, I’m much more permissive of delusion. This person should, of course, pass basic competence checks. If they tell me they’re going to revolutionize space travel but have never taken a physics course, it’s probably fine to write them off.
Unfortunately for us mere mortals, only in hindsight can we determine if our delusion was well-timed. So, may God grant us humility most of the time and a healthy dose of delusion every now and again when we face a seemingly-insurmountable obstacle that should, nevertheless, be climbed.