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Sun, 5 September 2004
Believing vs Knowing
I took the opportunity last Saturday night to talk with an epidemiologist who'd spent time doctoring in Mozambique in the 1980s. I asked him what the experience had taught him.
"Everything,' he replied. "Everything I know now, I learnt there".
Mozambique was a tough country in the 1980s: on top of poverty, malnutrition and endemic diseases it featured a civil war. Doctoring there required him to break medicine down to its essential elements. But it's in that sort of environment that you discover why the essentials of any field are what they are. You find out things for sure. Rather than having learnt and believing, you know.
My epidemoiologist friend told me a story about a friend looking through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter. "I used to believe that the planets went around the Sun and the moons went around the planets," the friend told him after a few minutes. "Now I know they do."
This difference between believing and knowing is vast. You learn a lot reading books, in courses, talking to people. It takes a different, more intense experience to create something you know, something that you'll stand up and defend. But these are the experiences worth seeking out.
