David Oks had a great note recently: This reminded me of an experience I had at MIT, where I was once part of the budgetary rounding error known as the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. In grad school, I lived in the Sidney-Pacific graduate dorm, a concentration of nerdiness so dense that it visibly warped the fabric of spacetime. One day, my friend Nic from Sid-Pac was defending his PhD dissertation in math, and a group of us were going to support him. I’d never been to a math defense before—but I was excited to see if I could follow along. At first, I almost did. Nic was motivating his project, explaining the problem, ruling out easy fixes. There were revealing moments—turns out “boring” is an important concept for mathematical research. Equations appeared and disappeared in puffs of chalk. I was feeling proud of myself for hanging on for dear life. Then Nic turned to the crowd, sighed a knowing sigh, and said (I’m paraphrasing): “Sorry, friends, but now I have to do the real math.” The rest of the talk was absolutely incomprehensible gibberish. I understood not one sentence for 30 minutes straight. Humbling experience, would recommend. I love that memory because I was just so totally dumbfounded. I was in the presence of someone who knew much, much more than I did about something I considered important, to which I had devoted a fair bit of time—and yet, clearly, I didn’t get it. Not even close. The feeling of undeniable ignorance is probably dangerous in high doses; you don’t want to crush your self-confidence (as I learned the hard way towards the start of grad school). But sometimes it’s nice to be dumbfounded. It’s important to be reminded of how complicated the world is—and how finite one’s knowledge can be. Most of us don’t have to think about our finitude. Thanks to the division of labor, knowledge workers can spend most of their lives within that tiny slice of the human experience in which they have acquired expertise. A specialist in Kant’s...