This week I received a call from a mother of two girls that I had tutored in Hebrew last spring, requesting tutoring for another one of her daughters. My exuberance about this proposition prompted a comment from one of my lab mates (you know who you are) that my teaching Hebrew would be like the blind leading the blind. As a recent (and continuing) student of the language, I understand the sentiment, and, although the dispute about my suitability for the project was congenially resolved (I won), this got me thinking about how our own perception of the limitations of our knowledge can be debilitating.
I'm currently writing my first scientific manuscript, to be released, I hope, in mid-September. Although I've been doing some of the analysis for this paper and should have quite a bit to contribute to the overall story once all is said and done, the fact remains that the project itself was initiated long before I joined the lab, and much of the analysis was done by others using methods that are at best only vaguely familiar to me. Of course this intimidates me. How am I supposed to make a coherent story, out of a bunch of disparate analyses done by a number of other people before I even showed up?
I have the same general sense of ineptitude whenever I try to talk (or write) intelligently about most scientific topics. I suppose there comes a point in your intellectual career when you realize the accumulated body of knowledge in any field is larger than you can ever hope to master. The real question then is whether to accept the paralytic fear of being wrong, or to plow ahead bravely, yet cautiously, into the intellectual unknown.
To quote (hopefully correctly) one of the pioneers of Jewish feminism:
"One must get over the feeling of knowing nothing. One simply makes a start somewhere and then continues." - Blu Greenburg
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