No one has even one percent of all the knowledge in a society, because knowledge is not all articulated rationally (as Sowell would say, and has).When my daughter was little she had an operation in a NY city hospital, and I found myself travelling daily on an otherwise unfamiliar route to visit her. After I had done so for a few times, I noticed myself driving in the left lane when it would have seemed more appropriate to stay in the right lane. So I swung over into the right lane - and was rewarded with a rough patch in the highway which was unpleasant to subject my undercarriage of my car to. Apparently I had subconsciously learned that, but didn't consciously know it until I consciously overrode my subconscious "knowledge" and consciously found out why I was doing what I was doing.
Any time you make a mistake, you have to ruefully realize that the chances are excellent that somebody somewhere was already so familiar with that particular trap that they wouldn't be caught dead falling into it. Look at the tables of stock prices: those represent the best current estimate of the values of those stocks, but time will show that nearly all of them are wildly inaccurate. All you have to do is know one stock which is wildly undervalued, and buy it on margin - or know one stock which is wildly overvalued, and sell it short. But do you do know one? If you do, you have bet the farm on it. If you haven't done so, then you don't know, do you? (That point came from Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell "Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare...").
It's shocking to me that any FReeper can read Thomas Sowell's columns and confess to having only read a paltry three of his books. The man has written dozens of books - and most of them are gems.
Good Lord. I hope that is not an indictment of ME reading a “Paltry” three of his books...I would presume having done that, I am in the upper five percent of nearly any demographic slice you would make!!!