'It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.'
Maria Popova (Brainpickings.org)
Another call to arms to go along with Steven Johnson's
"Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore"
and Seth Godin's "I Don't Get It" post. When we encounter something we don't know or don't understand, it is very easy to pull back and to avoid that question or concept. If we kept doing that for every unknown, we would develop an extremely restricted comfort zone. But this is a very deterministic approach. You tell yourself "If I don't know that already then I probably never will" even though that is far from the truth.
To solve the problems of the present and the future, we need to be more adept at flexible, adaptable and truly critical thinking. If we depend on some 'expert' to have the answers to the questions we don't know, we will be disappointed and lost when we realize they can't help us. I believe that in order to attack complex problems like climate change, poverty and hunger, energy, education, woman's right and gender inequality, and healthcare, it is more important to focus on what we can learn rather than what we already know.