Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Brother Francis produced the blueprint. “The highwayman was kind enough to leave this in my keeping, Holy Father. He – he mistook it for a copy of the illumination which I was bringing as a gift.”
“You did not correct his mistake?”
Brother Francis blushed. “I’m ashamed to admit, Holy Father –”
“This, then, is the original relic you found in the crypt?”
“Yes –”
The Pope’s smile became wry. “So, then – the bandit thought your work was the treasure itself? Ah – even a robber can have a keen eye for art, yes? Monsignor Aguerra told us of the beauty of your commemoration. What a pity that it was stolen.”
“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted fifteen years.”
“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this, might he not?”
Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
This image was once used to illustrate the subject areas for our WordPress-Cupertino Meetup group. Its many Layers of Complexity, before full-site editing (FSE), was introduced in version 5.
Now, knowledge of such complexity need not bother the minds of today. Intelligence has been made artificial.
People often misjudge their abilities. Those with less than average abilities overestimate their true abilities. Those with higher don’t realize how much higher. Stupid people are too stupid to know how stupid they are. Some smart people wrongly assume that most others can do what they can.
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.