Salute to incompetence. A challenging idea in this article. I was always annoyed by the arguments of the type "to be a truly educated person you have to know X", where X could have been history, biology or any other topic (and it was most annoying in cases where X was something I had zero interest in). I could see it was hypocrisy, given that the argument was always made by a person who was an expert in X but I could never put into words (happens all the time with me) why it was annoying. This little rant gives a great, rational argument why we cannot afford knowing about everything. Or even about many things. To make progress we need to specialize. Every day there's more and more to know about a single topic. Given that the time we have to acquire knowledge or our ability to do it doesn't change (much), we need to cope with this by not learning about other topics and it might just as well be that X is the topic we need to drop. That doesn't make us any less intelligent. Ignorance of X is necessary if we want to study Y in more depth.