I started my public outreach fifteen years ago with, "We don't know jack"

...and we all saw it first hand since Covid.

Fifteen years ago I wrote my first blog piece. That was 2008, and since then I have five more books, hundreds of articles, TV and video appearances.

But it just occurred to me today that the title of that first blog piece was prescient in light of the last three years.

The title was: "We don’t know jack."

The piece concerned the coming launch of my second book, Vision Revolution, but one side moral of that book was to communicate the extent to which academia is way WAY more retrograde than almost anyone grasps.

"Outsiders to the cognitive and brain sciences can sometimes get the impression that we brain scientists have nearly unraveled the riddles of the brain. While it is true that we are making great strides, the real question is, How far away from the finish line are we? Alas, I believe we are nowhere near the finish line; I put my money on several hundred years of brain-slogging left to go. Keep in mind that your brain is more complicated than the rest of the universe combined (minus all the other brains). Truth is, relative to what needs to be known, we don’t know jack...

Put simply, we don’t even know what we humans can do! And if we don’t know our powers, then we don’t even know what we need to explain. You can’t figure out how the brain carries out X if you don’t yet know we can do X!"

https://changizi.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/18/

And that general point applies, well, everywhere. Today's "experts" are tomorrow's alchemists.