In praise of ignorance: Guiding questions

1) In his TED talk about Ignorance, we quickly recognize that Firestein does not mean “stupidity”
or “indifference to fact or reason or data”. In the context of being a real scientist what attitudes
of mind about ignorance is Firestein actually championing?

Stuart Firestein stands up for an opinion not in a way that Ignorants are clearly unenlightened,
unaware or uninformed. He means a different kind of ignorance, the kind which is less pejorative and
comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that’s just not there to be known or isn’t
known well enough yet or we can’t make predictions from. The kind of ignorance that’s maybe best
summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, who said: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the
prelude to every real advance in science”. In my opinion, Stuart Firestein talks about an idea that each
ignorance separately and general ignorance, as a whole, can lead you to make a big progress in
scientific future, if you really want to close this gap in knowledge.

2) Firestein mentions with plenty of irony that his fact-filled Neuroscience textbook weighs more
than two normal human brains. If the boundaries of knowledge and ignorance are so important,
to what extent is it still important to learn facts?

In a part of his speech, Stuart Firestein says that the fact is something that scientists controllingly
neglect. You have to know a lot of facts to be a lawyer or an accountant, just because knowing facts is
their job. Of course, you also need to know facts to be a scientist, but knowing a lot of stuff doesn’t
make you a scientist, it’s just not the point. Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help a scientist to get to
more ignorance. So knowledge is a big subject, but ignorance is a bigger one. I consider that according
to these statements we could figure out next: knowing a lot of facts and rules can help us to realise what
we don’t know, because the more you know the more you understand that you don’t know anything
and as we figured out before - it is ignorance that helps us advance in science. And in such a case, this
can be very important.

3) Based on what you already know about scientific method, to what extent is it accurate to say that
science is all about “question propagation”? Can we say the same about History? How about
other Areas of Knowledge?

Philosopher Immanuel Kant a hundred years ago come up with an idea of question propagation, which
means that every answer begets more questions. So knowledge generates ignorance, was said by George
Bernard Shaw and finally it turns out that we use knowledge to come up with higher-quality ignorance to
ask more questions and answer this. Talking about exact sciences I am sure that all advances and new
investigations were reached like this, when scientists all ready new some facts, but they were not sure in the
evidence or wanted to look at specific situation with different conditions which they didn’t know and
nobody have done this before. So you start searching and find something very new. For human sciences it
works in a little bit different way, for instance- history. In fact, all the most important events we know from
sources (primary and secondary), but we can’t always trust them, so sometimes you can question the
correctness and truthfulness of the facts. It’s always possible to find other points of view on a situation was
happening (whatever it was: battle, referendum, conference etc) and finally make an absolutely different
representation of what was happening. So again: knowledge brings us to ignorance and asking questions,
and ignorance in turn leads us to make progress. The same happens in all spheres of our life: since birth we
study from investigating something new, something we don’t know, which is basically – Ignorance.