The Circumference of My Ignorance

Picture yourself standing in a dark dense forest. Nothing is visible but the trunks of trees. The sky and the daylight struggle to penetrate through the pines and the leaves. To hand you have an axe. To create a path or a clearing you realize you have to cut down the trees.

You start to chop at the tree in front of you. Slowly, painfully slowly, you struggle to make a dent, then a notch, then a full slice and after interminable effort the tree begins to fall, brushing past its neighbors that try to keep it upright, but then accelerating and crashing onto the forest floor.

One down. Hundreds, thousands, millions to go.

You keep chopping. Two, three, four, five, six trees fall. The clearing grows larger. There is more room to swing the axe. Seven, eight, nine, ten. There is more light from above, more air, more room to lean back to see birds and clouds float high above the crowns of the trees that still surround you.

Back to work. Back to chopping.

Eleven, 12, 13, 14, 15.

The circle you stand in grows larger. Larger and larger with each capitulating trunk.

Sixteen, 17, 18, 19, 20.

Enough for one day.

Then the thought occurs. The more trees I chop down the more trees there are to chop down. The circle around me gets bigger the more trees I fell. The circumference expands the more I do.

Hmmm. Maybe I should stop? Or should I persevere? Let me sleep on it and in the morning I’ll decide what to do.

*

And then you woke up.

*

The dream conveys a message. An eternal truth. Known to ancient Greeks but lost on many modern geeks.

The more you know, the more there is to know.

Every day I read and learn things I didn’t know. And I’m no spring chicken. Just this week I’ve learnt about the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the works of Serge Chermayeff, the Dutch settling of New Amsterdam, the improvisational startup, the musings on AI of Tobi Lutke.

I’m not boasting. I’m just trying to explain that the circumference of my ignorance has increased.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Cape Cod Modern; Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape by Peter McMahon and Christine Cipriani, The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto, The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, a memo from Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke.

All fascinating. All humbling. All - messages from the past, present, and future - proof that my world, the world, is inexhaustible.

*

The circumference of our ignorance grows every day. Each tree we cut down - protein folding, fusion power, model context protocol, Manus - expands the circumference of what there is still to cut. To know.

We don’t know how the economy works, how to balance opportunity with inclusion, how to prevent cancer or garbage islands in the ocean, whether there is life on other planets or how to win the Premier League, how to run the DMV, or teleport or cure the common cold or hangovers. We don’t know how to get along, or to be happy. We don’t know what consciousness is or how it is created. Why we’re here. Why there’s something rather than nothing. We don’t know how to talk to the animals or journey to the center of the Earth.

One day we will.

*

Twenty one, 22, 23, 24, 25.

The trees keep falling. But are still there all around you.

Keep cutting. Keep expanding the circumference of your ignorance. All our futures - including the future of our work - rest on it.