One advantage of getting older is that you (can) realize that age doesn’t make you smarter. I have been carrying many of my self-proclaimed best ideas with me for 30 years now, and I have fine-tuned them a little here and there, and maybe see them clearer in a wider context, but they are basically the same ideas.

I am older now, but I have learned over the years that I know very little about many things and a little more about a few things. This knowledge that we don’t get smarter or have better ideas when we get older is something I also use when I look at people that I have admired, like Richard Dawkins, for instance. When I read his books and learned about what was written in them, I was still young, naive, and impressed. Naivety is something that slowly erodes, and though I am still impressed by most of his work, I am also disappointed. Over the years, I have learned that these writers are just like you and me, and the internet gave me the tools to easily find out what lives they live behind the façade I erected in front of them. They can have their opinions, of course, but it’s just a shame that with all the effort they put into their professional work, they say utter nonsense while the answers are easily accessible from their phones. 

But now I know about his political views, which makes me sad. I long for the days that I  could naively believe that a scholar who has produced such enlightened work could never simultaneously produce so much nonsense when they speak about things they know little about. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in full force. It’s what they say: never meet your idols, just keep reading their good books.

It’s just disappointment, and I fear I will unknowingly do the same…and that’s my first lie, it’s not fear, I know it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human. All Too Human II

The Wanderer and His Shadow

2 The world’s reason. -That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be definitively proven by the fact that the piece of the world that we do know-I mean our human reason -is not all that rational. And if it is not at all times and in all ways wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be so either; here the deduction a minori ad majus, apart ad totum* holds, and, to be sure, with decisive force.

*From the lesser to the greater, from the part to the whole.