Learning To See Our Ignorance

An excerpt from BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker, who is learning this lesson in the course of writing his new book:

This reminds me of an interview I had a couple of months ago with Terry Therneau, a researcher and statistician at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn. He said that the more doctors learned about the intricacies of the human system, the more complexity they saw. He compared it to an experience he had long ago as a teenaged camp counselor. He decided one summer to learn the name of every tree in the northern Minnesota forests. The more trees he learned, though, the more he saw. Trees that he once thought were the same turned out to be different varieties. A system that seemed "learnable" turned out to be nearly bottomless.