The Illusion of Knowledge

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge"
Daniel Boorstin, 1984 Librarian of Congress

I am a naturally skeptical person (probably why I am an engineer) and I tend to analyse everything to death before I make a decision. But unlike many people I try to analyse things impartially and do not depend on opinions of the uneducated to form my ideas. Nearly everyone has opinions that are mis-informed about everything whether it is health, sex, marriage, money, business, network marketing, real estate and especially science (its really sad to me how poorly educated we are about science in the US since many of the political decisions of the day are being made based on poor scientific knowldege).

Global Warming is my personal scientific pet peeve. We have less than 100 years of fairly good scientific data on temperatures, yet we try to extrapolate that data over the life of the planet and think we can predict some disaster. Understanding normal variation is not something people seem able to grasp. Every weather event is treated like a unique event. This only demonstrates to me a foolish lack of perspective!

Getting good data is also of paramont importance when evaluating a new business as well. Now when you are investing $1,000,000 into a business you probably will do some due diligence. However, for businesses like Network Marketing with low entry costs, nearly no one does due diligence. So I found that people asked their "expert" friends about the business and they got information on how prices are too high or the market is saturated or whatever. When I got involved in the Amway business I did not ask one unsuccessful person what they thought of it. I investigated the pricing structure, the quality of the products, the payouts, the franchise "system", and interviewed people that had made the business work.

Likewise, in the real estate business, I've investigated lots of different systems, bought several and evaluated how they work. I only like to talk to successful people about what works. I like real knowledge, not theoretical knowledge about what might work.

Know that doesn't mean I won't listen to people that have failed at something. Certainly they can provide valuable insights. However, most people really didn't fail because they really didn't try. So 99.9% of their opinions are worthless.

Meanwhile thousands of people listen to Barbara Streisand rant about global warming while flying around in her private jet ruining the atmosphere.