The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it. The intelligent person hesitates, ponders, wavers. The unintelligent never wavers, never hesitates. Where the wise will whisper, the fool simply declares from the housetops. – Osho
I’ve never read any of Osho’s books. The topics he chooses to write about don’t interest me, but I stumbled across this quote from him recently and really liked it.
I came down with a doozy of a cold over the weekend, so my brain is foggy. These are the things I think about when the fog lifts temporarily:
Why does this seem to be so common?
Is it intelligence or education that makes people more willing to admit what they don’t know?
Will we ever find a cure for the Dunning-Kruger effect?
What do you think?
This is a topic worthy of a blog post. I suspect this has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with education. Education teaches us impulse control, along with the knowledge there is more we don’t know than we know.
There’s a lot of truth to that.
I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Mark Twain:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Perhaps the things we ‘know for sure’ are the things we need to cling to when life seems so overwhelmingly ephemeral – when we sense there is really nothing to hold on to.
That’s a very interesting take on it.
I think it has to do with emotional intelligence and humility, rather than simply IQ intelligence or education.
Oh, I like that.