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Thesis: Gaining and employing knowledge in the right ways and on the right subjects can be instrumental in creating a happy and intellectually stimulating environment, yet so much of this world is dominated by inefficient, incorrect information that can cause dismay through a negative knowledge curve.

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Ignorance is Bliss

It’s commonly said that ignorance is bliss. But is it?

Thomas Gray famously coined the phrase “ignorance is bliss” in his poem Ode on a Distant Prospect at Eton College.

In popular culture, we often hear the phrase “ignorance is bliss” used as an excuse. Some people prefer not to watch the news and remain ignorant of all of the horrible things going on in our world. So, is it true that ignorance is bliss?

There may be more truth in this thought than at first glance.

Charles Bukoski, American poet, novelist, and short story writer, writes, "Sadness is caused by intelligence, the more you understand things, the more you wish you didn't understand them."

Many times unawareness of facts may spare us from anxiety, deluding us into a happy approval of situations that can be inherently dangerous. In contrast, knowledge opens our eyes to the many dilemmas of life and their unfortunate resistance to reasonable solutions.

So what’s a better way to test this than to educate ourselves on the potentially unfortunate things happening in the world - get rid of some of our ignorance?

Credit Historia Magistra

Knowledge of Current Events

The idea for this article came from a Reddit thread on r/AskReddit entitled “What is a ticking time bomb that people should be worried about but aren’t aware of?”

Here are some of the top examples:

Credit One Health Trust

Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance happens when germs like bacteria and fungi develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them (antibiotics). That means these germs are not killed but continue to grow, unhindered.

The United States Center for Disease Control writes the following:

[Antibiotic] resistance is an urgent global public health threat, killing at least 1.27 million people worldwide and associated with nearly 5 million deaths in 2019. In the U.S., more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year. More than 35,000 people die as a result…

They also cite that “[Antibiotic resistance] is one of the world’s most urgent public health problems.”

Bacteria and fungi do not have to be resistant to every antibiotic or antifungal to be dangerous. Resistance to even one antibiotic can mean serious problems. For example:

• Antibiotic infections that require the use of multiple types of antibiotic treatments can harm patients by causing serious side effects and prolonging care and recovery, sometimes for months.
• Many medical advances are dependent on the ability to fight infections using antibiotics.
• In some cases, antibiotic-resistant infections have no treatment options.

If antibiotics and antifungals lose their effectiveness, then we lose the ability to treat infections and control these public health threats.

Credit CNN

Overfishing

Overfishing occurs when too many fish in a particular ecosystem are caught and there are not enough adults to breed and sustain a healthy population.

The Marine Stewardship Council cites the following:

The level of overfishing has been increasing in recent decades and the number of overfished stocks is now three times higher than in 1970. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization monitors over 500 fish stocks around the globe. In 2022, it is estimated that over 35% of these fish stocks were overfished.

For communities reliant on fishing, the impact of overfishing can be devastating. Overfishing is also one of the major causes of the loss of ocean biodiversity.

Factors driving overfishing include the following:

• Rising consumption - consumption of fish (farmed and wild) is rising twice as fast as the population is growing.
• Climate change - increases in ocean temperatures change the migration routes of fish, causing them to move away from traditional fishing grounds. Overfishing occurs when people continue to catch the same level even though some of their target species have moved elsewhere.
• Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing - catching fish without abiding by regulations or not reporting parts of your catch.
• Fishing subsidies - governments have spent billions on subsidies to support their fishing industries, sometimes supporting fishing in overexploited areas where catch revenue will not be enough to cover the expense of fishing.

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Insect Extinction

Unknown to most, the world’s insect population is hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening what some call a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”.

Research shows that over 40% of insect species are declining and over a third are endangered. The total mass of insects is falling by 2.5% a year (over 8x faster than that of mammals, birds, or reptiles).

Insects are essential for the proper functioning of many ecosystems, providing food for other creatures, facilitating pollination, and recycling nutrients.

Intense agriculture through the use of pesticides is the main driver of this decline, but urbanization and climate change are also significant factors.

Unless we change our ways of producing and consuming, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.

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Erosion of Land Quality

Desertification is the process by which natural or human causes reduce the productivity of drylands.

Around half of Earth’s ice-free land surface is considered drylands, and more importantly, these drylands cover some of the world’s poorest countries. According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, over 250 million people are affected by desertification.

Where it gets specifically important is that this United Nations Convention cites that around 135 million people may be displaced by desertification by 2045, and over 50 million people may be displaced by 2035.

Granted the issue of desertification is not new, it has played a significant role throughout human history, contributing to the collapse of several large empires, and the displacement of local populations. But, today the pace of land degradation is estimated at 30-35x the historical rate.

The immediate cause of deforestation is the loss of most vegetation driven by drought, climate shifts, overgrazing, and deforestation. Vegetation plays a major role in determining the biological composition of the soil and studies show the rate of erosion and runoff decreases exponentially with increased vegetation cover.

Desertification causes sand and dust storms (a 25% increase since the 1900s), food insecurity, increased poverty, and many more.

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Biodiversity

Biodiversity refers to the variety of all life on Earth from bacteria to plants to people. A common measure of this variety is the count of species in an area.

Humans rely on biodiversity to survive. Biodiversity forms the web of life that we depend on for so many things–food, water, medicine, a stable climate, economic growth, etc. The United Nations cites that over half of the global GDP is dependent on nature.

Up to 1 million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades. The main driver of biodiversity loss remains humans’ use of land (primarily for agriculture). Humans have already altered over 70% of all ice-free land.

Biodiversity plays an important role in mitigating climate change. When human activities produce C02, half of the emissions remain in the atmosphere, but the other half is absorbed by the land and ocean. These ecosystems are natural carbon sinks, providing nature-based solutions to climate change.

Conserving and restoring natural spaces is essential for limiting carbon emissions and adapting to an already changing climate. About 1/3rd of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed in the next decade could be achieved by improving nature’s ability to absorb emissions.

Credit Truthout

Pandemic Ecosystem

Given the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve witnessed how our societal advances have negatively impacted us, potentially creating the ideal characteristics for future pandemics and epidemics.

What’s leading us to this?

• Increased human-animal contact: As human populations expand and encroach further into wild habitats, there is an increased chance for zoonotic (animal-transferred) diseases like COVID-19 to make the jump from animals to humans.
• Rapid urbanization and globalization: More crowded urban areas allow diseases to spread readily between people once they emerge.
• Increased global travel and trade: Infections can now spread worldwide in a matter of days due to extensive air travel networks and interconnected economies.
• Climate change: As climates shift, disease carriers like mosquitos can expand into new geographic areas, bringing diseases once limited to certain regions to other ecosystems.
• Vaccine hesitancy: The resistance of some groups to accept vaccination means diseases countries had previously controlled can re-emerge and create new variant strains.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic increased general worldwide pandemic preparedness in many countries, experts warn these changes listed above still provide significant opportunities for novel pathogens to arise and spread–potentially sparking more health and economic crises.

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Food Security

Food security refers to the availability of, access to, and affordability of nutritious food for all people at all times.

The World Food Programme cites that as many as 783 million people are facing chronic hunger. That’s around 1 in 10 people around the world on average, an astonishing number.

Our World in Data gives us a little more historical context for undernourishment over time in various regions of the world.

Credit Our World in Data

Conflict is still the biggest driver of hunger, with 70% of the world’s hungry people living in areas affected by war and violence.

In addition, the climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops, and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves.

Wikipedia also highlights the following causes of food insecurity: global water crisis, land degradation, agricultural diseases, food waste, overfishing, fossil fuel dependence, food prices, pandemics, etc.

Credit Steemit

Philosophy of Knowledge

Now that you’ve been educated, is ignorance bliss?

In contrast to the popular statement “ignorance is bliss” we have “knowledge is power”. In his famous statement, “All I know is that I know nothing” Socrates’ combines the two ideas, ignorance, in this case, being a form of wisdom–wisdom rooted in the acknowledgment of what one does not know.

And this knowledge of non-knowledge is power. Right?

Knowledge is a funny thing.

As I highlighted above, there are circumstances in which knowledge can be powerful, and there are others in which knowledge isn’t powerful.

Consider another example from the Reddit post, that of the erosion of education. In the United States, misinformation is spreading at an ever-increasing rate throughout all facets of the information exchange.

Our education system in the United States has become so focused on metrics and standardized test performance that we’ve lost the true value of knowledge. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills have been effectively boiled out of the curriculum. Students aren’t taught to challenge their own thinking or the thinking of others and are instead shown through social media that their voice will be able to have an audience, no matter how incorrect it may be.

Using knowledge to educate yourself on topics you are undereducated on is powerful and should be encouraged.

In what other ways can you use knowledge for powerful purposes?

The goal of this article is to expose you to the idea of knowledge curves (as I call them).

Negative Knowledge curves are ones in which gaining initial knowledge is good (and should be done), but as more knowledge is gained, outcomes and perspectives actually get worse on the subject.

I’ll use an example from my own life regarding a negative knowledge curve that I think will showcase how this concept works in practicality. In the summer of 2022, I was in Pennsylvania working with business school professors on research on nuclear energy (specifically thorium micronuclear reactors).

While there, my love for energy was sparked and I was fascinated by what I was learning about the development and education within the space. Yet, there was a turning point where I put two and two together to discover that even though the nuclear industry has many positives, solutions aren’t feasible in our daily life anytime soon (culminating recently in “Nuclear is Not a Viable Solution”).

Now, even if there are positive developments in the nuclear industry that are working towards a viable solution, I’m instantly disheartened as I know what it will take to truly have nuclear be a viable solution.

Conversely, we can speak about the Positive Knowledge Curve, a curve that doesn’t decrease as the amount of knowledge you have about a subject continues to increase.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, I picked up the passion of baking. My goal that year (and every year since) was to make 52 new recipes in 52 weeks. Ever since I started baking and learning more about the process of making food, it’s provided a great outlet to be creative and curious.

So far, and it’s been a consistent habit for years now, as I’ve grown my knowledge, it’s only made me better and happier (and the people around me appreciate the food).

So, why are knowledge curves important?

With some subjects (generally those with a negative knowledge curve), ignorance can be bliss. Is it worth learning more and more about a subject just to end up despising the knowledge you’ve gained? For most people, no.

Yet, ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to positive knowledge curves. These are subjects that only get better as you learn more about them.

As a college student, I see the mindset of knowledge curves playing a very important role in my future career as I strive to find opportunities that have positive knowledge curves. To best set myself up for success and a positive environment, I’m trying to find a subject matter and job role that allows me to learn and grow and continually be made better and happier through it.

But, it doesn’t have to be this large of an intention. It can be smaller things like picking up baking, reading philosophy books, exercising, etc.

Being proactive about seeking out positive knowledge curves allows you to be happier, curious, and intelligent with a beneficial purpose and subject matter.

Positive knowledge curves are power.

Anywho, that’s all for today.

-Drew Jackson