Two people are evidence that solid knowledge is not pervasive in our society.
Kevin Kelly wrote a book of his extensive observations of the Internet world and the way it was changing the world of business and perceptions. The book was widely praised as brilliant and innovative. The outlandish title was Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World.
At the time the book was published I remember reading a scathing criticism by an economist (probably Krugman, but I can’t find the reference) who pointed out that nothing Kelly had discovered was new, it was all described fully in commonly used econ text books. Kelly didn’t know the rudiments of what was well established knowledge in economics.
The same was true for a book by Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind. The book was about Minsky’s concepts of the mind as it related to artificial intelligence and was widely praised as brilliant and innovative.
I interviewed the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and his brother and engineer Stuart Dreyfus, both of whom worked with Minsky at MIT. They said that Minsky didn’t know the rudiments of philosophy and hadn’t a functional knowledge of Plato or Aristotle or he could never had written such a book. Minsky was ignorant of two thousand years of philosophical work and research.
No lessons here, just a description of reality. Today’s brilliant new insight may have been discarded chaff thousands of years ago.