Never forget …

… Libraries, a reminder of how little we know - Columns - livemint.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Taleb defines the unread books as an anti-library: They are an ever-present reminder of how much one still does not know. It is a tool of epistemic modesty, or the knowledge that a lot is still unknown, and perhaps unknowable. Such recognition of ignorance is a useful antidote to the disease of certitude, usually present in people who have read too little or not at all. As the great behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman reminds us: “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” Every library thus has a fundamental tension between knowledge and ignorance, between what you have read and what you have not. A large collection of unread books is both a reminder of our ignorance as well as a call for intellectual modesty.