"The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing" - Socrates, according to some guy on Yahoo! answers

"The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" - David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that manifests in two ways. Firstly, those who lack skills in a subject perceive themselves to be significantly better than they really are, attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize one's own ineptitude. Secondly, those who have considerable skill in a subject may suffer from weak self-confidence, attributed to their possible assumption that those around them share said skill. We all know of people who are not good at something, but constantly claim to be amply good. Some of us may also know people who are good at things, and don't realize that others aren't too. This effect is loosely related to the quote in the title, attributed to Socrates though possibly it's from Aristotle and more probably neither of them said it explicitly, they just said something vaguely like that.

It's particularly interesting to me that we can talk about the action of knowing something as precluding further knowledge. What a thought that is! Really though, what we're saying is not nearly so concrete. After all, there are experts in fields for reasons. They didn't all just make stuff up to gain popularity. Rather, those who know a lot about a subject know that they know a lot about said subject. They also know, however, increasingly more about the parts of the subject they don't yet know about; questions raised by research designed to answer questions raised by earlier research, and so on.

So what does this have to do with Libra? Well, I think when I talked in class earlier about this concept, it became an impromptu implicit proof of the maxim that we may never know what exactly happened in the JFK assassination. And to that, I say, well, maybe? But don't be so sure. The thing is, we still learn about subjects. We still gain knowledge. We still make narratives. It is easier to complicate a narrative today, surely. It is easier to find evidence that points toward an incorrect conclusion as well. But, the whole aim of science is to be able to do better with this, and make statements with greater and greater confidence. There is, naturally, no such thing as saying all but a precious few things are undoubtedly true. Even criminal courts can only require proof "beyond reasonable doubt." There is no way we could force lawyers to argue against unreasonable doubt, even if they were at a later date proven not as unreasonable as originally thought. And, certainly, there may or may not be reasonable doubt in the case for Lee as the lone gunman of November 22, but with more and more successful ways to interpret data (notice that I focus on interpreting, not creating), we can push doubts to be more or less reasonable.