Knowing when to jump - Part 1

This is a long post, so I've decided to post it in segments to make it more manageable. Anyway.

I'm doing something a little more nerdy than usual these days. I'm reading a textbook. For fun.

Even at the height of my nerdom - speedwalking to eighth grade history with a book in one hand, eight books in the other, and a red fleece zip-up sweater tied around my waist - I would never have read a textbook for fun. I was much too busy working my way through the nine-book Star Wars: X-Wing series. I read textbooks only when they were assigned. I had some standards.

Well, I haven't started reading the dictionary or going through wikipedia alphabetically yet, but I have to believe that somehow I've crossed a line. Just when I think I'm finally well-adjusted ...

Anyway, the point of this post is not to overly analyze my new manifestation of nerdiness. The textbook is an introductory economics textbook by Greg Mankiw, and I'm loving it. I'm learning about markets and trade and taxes, and I'm amazed at how incredibly basic math concepts lead to really interesting implications. The one problem is, the math is simple because of some pretty huge assumptions that undergird the 'science' of economics, and that finally brings me to my point.

In the course of my education, I have gradually become aware of some limitations on human knowledge that I hadn't thought about before. Basically, we don't actually know very much.

What I mean to say is, when we look at scientists, we assume that they really know for sure what they're telling us ... and that's just not true. Everything in science is a work in progress, and nothing is absolutely nailed down, and not all disciplines are equal.

There are some areas where I'm confident we have a good working approximation of the truth. Newton's expression of the laws of motion, for instance, was so reliable that we could use his ideas to strap three guys to an enormous piece of exploding metal, throw them 90,000 miles into space, put them on the moon and then bring them back - five or six times. The basic laws of heredity and genetics seem pretty solid, and a nuclear power plant is a testament to how useful our understanding of the periodic table can be.

But in all of these areas, the things we're really certain about are surprisingly limited. And that's what I'm going to talk about in part two, when I hope the title of this blog post will start making sense.