How do you know, what you don’t know---if you don’t know what you know, in order to know ?
chat, run that one back one more time.
How do you know...what it is you don't, if you don't know what you know, in order for you to know?
See that’s exactly the problem, we is on the wrong side of the of the dunning kruger curve…
But thats no riddle i just bs’ed— thats also analogous to:
Education is just the continual realization of how much it is you don’t know.
Because that’s what it means to learn…
Also analogous to:
“why stupid people think they themselves are smart” “the stupidest you could be is to not know that you are stupid”
Also adjacent to:
To know something is to know how little it is you know – Socrates
Also:
Like Dunning once wrote:
"If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."
In Chinese, there is an expression that goes something like,
"the most dangerous person is the half trained."
Because absolute beginners understand that they are beginners and therefore are extra careful; whereas the half trained are just knowledgeable and confident to cause a problem, but not trained enough to get themselves out of it.
You are the beginner, you know what you don't know. But an incompetent person is exactly just competent enough to make a fool of themselves …
Or similar: 最怕半吊子 (“what’s most troublesome is the half-baked amateur…”)
or 最怕半瓶醋乱指挥 (“the worst is the “half-knower” who starts directing others…”).
学然后知不足 — Liji (Book of Rites, “Xue Ji”)
“Only after learning do you realize your insufficiency.” supports the point that genuine learning tends to produce humility, not swagger or something to boast.
记问之学，不足以为人师 — also from Liji commentary tradition
This says, roughly, that mere memorized or second-hand learning is not enough to qualify someone to teach others.
There is also a very common folk image behind this whole idea: the notion that the half-full bottle makes noise, while the truly full one is quiet.
modern chinese preserve versions like:
“a full bottle doesn’t rattle; the half-full one make noise,”
used to mock shallow people who are loud and showy. I like this idiom because it's visual.
That image matches 半瓶醋 pretty well. Had to ask gpt bcuz im CBC.
半瓶醋 (bàn píng cù)
Literal: “half a bottle of vinegar.”
Meaning: someone with only a little knowledge or skill who often acts like an expert. Very close to “knows enough to be dangerous.”
坐井观天 (zuò jǐng guān tiān)
Literal: “sit in a well and view the sky.”
Meaning: mistaking one’s tiny field of view for the whole world.
井底之蛙 (jǐng dǐ zhī wā)
Literal: “the frog who sits at the bottom of the well”
A visual for someone of limited outlook and experience
夜郎自大 (yè láng zì dà)
Meaning: ignorant yet wildly self-important. Han Dian traces it to the Shiji story where the ruler of Yelang, cut off from the wider world, asks whether Han is as large as his own realm.
Or perhaps,
Something similar for combat engineers in the US Army. It went something like, the comfortable man is a dead man. Basically, once you get comfortable with handling explosives—that'll be the day you make a mistake, get cocky or complacent—and end up dead or killing your own guys.
Always question—Question everything—don’t take shit at face value, read between the lines— stay curious, alert, and proactively careful.
This is why the socratic method of learning is to spam answers the question to why, because we can only self-spot the gaps in our own knowledge(other people can’t know for you)—to break the: you need to know in order to know what you don’t know loop.
Yes the Dunning effect, or the Mountain of Stupidity!
This is seen absolutely everywhere. It is not possible for the naive to know that they are naive, for then they wouldn’t be naive? The ignorant cannot spot that they themselves are ignorant. To recognize you’re ignorant would require baseline of knowledge that would break it.
The frog who sits in a well ... does not know what the sea is like .....
[unfinished]