Meet your heroes.

You will quickly reach something you think is utterly trivial, required knowledge, they know absolutely nothing about.
Your mental model of what’s essential, that you developed in isolation from others, is actually impossibly broken.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 30, 2019

Absolutely true.

People often ascribe high intelligence to me because I know twice or three times as much as they do. But I know two percent or even three percent of the available knowledge. They know one percent. So yes, I know twice or even three times as much but it’s an illusion in an important sense.

Because I still don’t know anything! And as you get older and wiser, you see more and more the vast gulfs in your knowledge and understanding that will never be filled, and can never be filled. The chasms ever widen and your brain still moves at the same old speed as before.

So someone is like, “You are so smart!” And then I’m thinking, “Damn, I’m an idiot, so if this person thinks I am smart….”