https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/charles_darwin_141357

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
--Charles Darwin

Think about Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's writings on racial relations; Boyd K. Packer's comments on mastaurbation; Russell Nelson's comments on homosexuality; and Wendy Watson Nelson's comments on spiritual sex, to name just a few, and it can easily be seen that Mr. Darwin's comments can be effectively applied to the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who, though they know (or knew) next to nothing about the topics on which they commented, got a lot of people to believe that they knew everything and those who studied and became experts knew nothing. And the consequences, for a lot of people, have been very tragic from ruined lives to suicides.

I have noticed that in the workplace. I was working at a place and at some point, they made a young and obviously inexperienced guy a subject matter expert.
When I asked him a question, it was obviously either none sense or he would go and ask the other subject matter experts.
Either he would not listen to the question and go into some other direction or it was none sense.
What you know doesn't matter. It is all about image. Image sells.
It saddens me that we live in a society where knowledge has less value than marketing.

^^^^^That kind of stuff is well covered in Dilbert.

In psychology, there is this
Dunning-Kruger effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
which summarizes as the more inept you are, the smarter you think you are.

It makes sense.
The more I have studied and still do, the more I recognize that there are many gaps in my knowledge. The amount of research papers and subjects is immense. No single human can master all of science.

"Think about Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's writings on racial relations;"

==I don't know much about mormonism. I heard Brigham Young was a racist hole. He said something about "Shall I tell you about the negro race. If you marry a niger, I'll kill you in your sleep.".

What did Joseph Smith say?

"Boyd K. Packer's comments on masturbation"
"Russell Nelson's comments on homosexuality; and Wendy Watson Nelson's comments on spiritual sex"

==What did he say?
I can't judge them without knowing what they said. Perhaps they have made some valid points.

"And the consequences, for a lot of people, have been very tragic from ruined lives to suicides."

==It's not easy to convince theists that their way is wrong because it is like telling them that their god is wrong.
In their mind, their religion is absolutely correct, the jewish god is absolutely real, and his morals are absolute.
Quite a lot of them seem to be faithful soldiers. They don't have morals. They simply obey the rules of the jewish god.

It saddens me that we live in a society where knowledge has less value than marketing.

COMMENT: I will take it one step further. It saddens me that we live in a society where just about everything has more value than knowledge--unless the knowledge happens to produce some gadget that makes peoples' lives easier, or more fun. Knowledge for its own sake? Well that's rare, which we can see even on the Recovery Board by how unwilling most people are to challenge their mental faculties beyond their surface understanding; whatever that might be.
______________________________________________

In psychology, there is this
Dunning-Kruger effect . . . which summarizes as the more inept you are, the smarter you think you are.

It makes sense.

COMMENT: Well, I am not much for psychological theories, but simply as an observational matter, I do often see this correlation. But, it is not always translatable into one's education level. There are a lot of intellectually "inept" scientists, who nonetheless think they are much smarter than they are. A sure sign is when they exhibit dogmatic and condescending opinions about matters that are out of the ordinary or controversial.
____________________________________________

The more I have studied and still do, the more I recognize that there are many gaps in my knowledge. The amount of research papers and subjects is immense. No single human can master all of science.

COMMENT: This statement is what motivated me to respond to your post. It is so true! You may be interested in another quote by Barrow:

"At present, it takes about six years of secondary schooling, followed by three years of university study, before science students are equipped to start understanding what is going on at one of the frontiers of a mathematical science. It then usually takes two or three years before they are able to make unaided contributions to knowledge. This educational path is not optimized for scientific research of course: it must accommodate all sorts of people. Clearly, it takes considerable time and effort to reach one of the frontiers of human understanding. Most students never reach one at all. As our knowledge deepens and widens, so it will take longer to reach a frontier. This situation can be combated only by increased specialization, so that a progressively smaller part of the frontier is aimed at, or by lengthening the period of training and apprenticeship. Neither option is entirely satisfactory. Increased specialization fragments our understanding of the Universe. Increased periods of preliminary training are likely to put off many creative individuals from embarking upon such a long path with no sure outcome." (John Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits.)

This book was written in 1998, it is much worse now. And what you find--if you are scientific reader like I am-- is that people who reach the frontier of understanding in one small area, often do not hesitate to comment on matters of which they have spent little or no time understanding, and which are only peripherally related to their area of expertise. One might be an expert on mathematical physics, and QM, say, but know next to nothing about cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, or for that matter mathematical logic.
______________________________________________

It's not easy to convince theists that their way is wrong because it is like telling them that their god is wrong.
In their mind, their religion is absolutely correct, the jewish god is absolutely real, and his morals are absolute.
Quite a lot of them seem to be faithful soldiers. They don't have morals. They simply obey the rules of the jewish god.

COMMENT: I would be careful here about stereotyping theists. Thoughtful theists, and most especially theologians, have reasons for their views--however misplaced. Few--I suggest--would claim absolutism or certainty, except extreme fundamentalists. Religion is most often simply a choice of faith in a climate of existential uncertainty. The problem is that such a choice often results is irrational behavior. A religious believer might admit that he or she is less than certain about a "Jesus is Lord" thesis, for example, but their commitment to their faith requires them to believe in certain things and act in certain ways. And for some that faith then becomes their reality; and they become immovable. *That* is what scares me.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." --Charles Darwin

COMMENT: Well, I have read a hell-of-a-lot of science, and in my experience it is often a little bit of "knowledge" that begets false confidence, rather than ignorance. Ignorance begets confidence only when there is a pre-existing worldview that eschews facts and evidence in favor of what one wants to believe; creating a psychological insistence that what one believes is true.

Now, consider Darwinism. That "theory" is based upon an assumption that human cognitive capacities are ultimately explained as the response to environmental circumstances that triggered natural selection in order to meet the demands of survival and reproduction. This is a very narrow path to the scope of human cognition, and by implication, scientific knowledge. It suggests that certain problems are beyond science simple because the solutions to such problems are not favored by any evolutionary selection effect.

Here is a quote from theoretical physicist, John Barrow:

"Our minds were not designed with science in mind, nor did evolution primarily fit them for that purpose. We possess the physical and mental attributes that we do as a result of an erratic process of adaptation to ancient environments whose challenges do not confront us today. . . We have to understand our scientific reasoning ability as a by-product of abilities selected for other, seemingly much more mundane, purposes. Thus, on the face of it, there is no reason why we should possess the conceptual ability to make sense of the way the Universe works. It would require a coincidence of cosmic proportions if the Universe were complicated enough to give rise to life, yet simple enough for one species to understand its deepest structure after just a few hundred years of serious scientific investigation. There is no reason to expect the Universe to have been constructed for our convenience."

Given the above, I do not find Darwin's quote all that "great." If his only point is that science is better than ignorance, and/or that certitude in the context of ignorance is much worse that certitude in the context of knowledge, then fine. But his venture into general human psychology is an example of a scientist going beyond his own knowledge and expertise, and generating inferences from his own ignorance, which is precisely what he was trying to avoid.

knowledge is over rated. Intelligence is the key.

Pure raw intelligence/ imagination is where ideas are born. You have to have the idea for the thing before you get the knowledge about the thing.

Once its imagined and made real, then you can have knowledge about how to use it.

As an engineer, I work with people that have tremendous "knowledge"....more than me for sure, but where I make up for it is intelligence/ imagination. I'm surprised at how many engineers don't have the ability to imagine and come up with a solution, but if the tools are already there for them, they can use them. I'm the guy that comes up with the tool that they can then gain knowledge about and use.