I loved this thought from Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Your real body of knowledge maps to the number of your social, moral, ethical, technical, business, financial, culinary, political, and scientific mistakes that you still remember and realize were mistakes.”
I like thinking about the inverse of Taleb’s rule.
How many mistakes have we forgotten?
And how many mistakes do we refuse to recognise as mistakes?
The sum of the above two questions could be classed as “avoidable ignorance”—meaning, we could be smarter, but our own errors of omission have left us in a worse spot.