As a ten year old, I dreamed of going into space, to the moon. Maybe other places outside the immediate neighborhood. The science fiction books I read encouraged me that such adventures were possible within my lifetime. And until 1981, that continued to be what I was working for. Then reality set in: married, one child born and another on the way, no manned space program going on, and my career path was firmly in the opposite direction.
Around the table sat twelve very educated, very intelligent scientists and leaders of scientists, at the sprawling corporate offices of one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. The subject was the presentation of research by a tiny biotech company, conducted over a two year period. The hope of the presenters was to establish a collaboration with “Big Pharma” in order to accelerate progress towards the commercial introduction of the biotech company’s unique technology.
In recent years, there has been a challenge to the classical economist’s interpretation of market behavior. From the earliest times of the field of economics, there has been proposed the existence of homo economicus, that is, the “economic man”, a being who is driven by self-interest to find the most efficient and cheapest way to fulfill his own needs and desires. The underlying premise is that humans are rational beings in their pursuit of self-interest.
I don’t care who you are or how great your store of wisdom, there are times in your life when you are clueless about how you represent yourself. And those times of befuddlement occur at a frequency rate directly correlated to your estimation of your own self-knowledge. The more you think you know, the higher the likelihood that you know yourself less.
