Widespread Ignorance and Closing The Barn Door After The Horse Has Bolted

I run into this situation all the time in my occupation: most people are ignorant of some policy or problem, they don't see a crisis looming, and then they freak out when everything blows up. Myself, emphatically, included. That's the feeling I get--I suppose everyone gets it--about Ukraine. I know almost nothing about it, and knew even less two weeks ago. That's how ignorant I was--two weeks of casual reading massively improved my understanding--to the level of merely embarrassing ignorance. Now I find myself thinking: if only, if only, if only... If only we'd taken the Russian problem more seriously...if only we'd taken legitimate Russian security concerns more seriously...if only we'd have seen Putin more clearly for what he is...  I mean, of course: some people did all these things. Romney and Rice, and lots of others tried to warn us. But most of us gave it all about two seconds thought--just enough to make fun of them. As Obama did. But zingers about the eighties wanting their foreign policy back are no substitute for...well, anything serious. Of course I also didn't take Biden and company seriously when they warned of an invasion. Or, rather: I guessed they were wrong. At least I acknowledged it as a guess. Which is something. And which was partially justified given their abject incompetence and whatnot. But still wrong, wrong, wrong. The stuff that I read and tentatively trust seem to indicate that this was all avoidable--and not just theoretically so, but actually. Now we're all in a tizzy and making pronouncements about things we, basically, don't understand at all. Fortunately we do have professionals in the State Department. Whatever their flaws, they know ten thousand times more than we do--and more than we can without years of study and practical experience. So godspeed to them.

   It's more and more obvious to me that I don't know anything about most things. I have a pretty good bullshit-detector, and can often identify the worst mistakes about lots of different things. It's something a lot of people don't seem to have. But it helps only so much. It's no substitute for careful study and long experience.

   This is kind of the Thomas Sowell point--academicians don't understand much at all outside of the narrow bounds of their specialty. That's not exactly a problem, but it becomes a problem when they think they do understand.