[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

It's easy to see when you're smarter or more knowledgeable than someone else who is less knowledgeable, but extremely difficult to tell when you're the one lacking understanding.

Understanding isn't some easy or trivial thing; it requires intense concentration at length, and usually all that does is expose how infinitely complex the subject is, rather than give a sense of mastery.

Perhaps the most reliable way to tell if someone is knowledgeable is if they say "the solution is easy".

That's what I call 'seeing other people's horizons of perception'.

Now it is interesting to watch when someone gets confronted with things outside their scope. Do they accept without further ado, do they investigate, do they ask for proof and if that proof is provided, do they accept it?

There's something as a complexity threshold too. If things get too complicated for one almost nothing gets in and most will be rejected.

Then there's expert blindness. If you're the expert you'll be extra wary of anything laymen and newcomers say or do.
Like the group of macaques, where a young male found a clever way to get drinking water from a pool they could not reach at first.
In due time all the other macaques copied the trick - except the old males...
They must have understood the trick, still they refused to use it.