People of Earth
Bill Gates said in an interview once that one of the first things he learned in college was that there were a lot of people smarter than he was. I think most of us come to appreciate different people and what they know because we realize early on just how much we don’t know. There are people out there that know how to do all sorts of things, and most of those things have value that we don’t really understand. This thought routinely occurs to me while watching Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel.
I read an article last week in the New York Times that reported 1 in 5 Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth. Hmm…I thought, who are these people? Bush voters? Kentuckians? But no, they’re probably just regular people. You might even know a few of them. They probably don’t especially stand out in day to day life. As crazy as it might sound, they may just not know anything about the solar system, or the Earth, or how it all works. Yes, it’s common knowledge to most of us. But common knowledge can be difficult to define.
It’s easy to categorize people based on your interactions with them (and I do), but most of the time people appear foolish simply due to a lack of information. This lack of information is typically compounded by the belief that it doesn’t exist. People often say that they don’t like a certain politician, or they believe a certain thing, but when questioned about it, they can’t give any reasons for thinking the way they do. I suspect that they’ve been led to believe they’re supposed to think a certain way, and so they do, but they don’t really know why. Plenty of people take the attitude that they know all they need to know already, and so they shut down. That kind of thinking leads people to believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
