Maybe it does. I would consider you utterly ignorant if you didn't know anyone known by several billion people.
There was this concept of general knowledge you used to aspire to which is becoming quickly replaced by the atomization of information among tiny communities which go unaware of each other, this might end up as some postmodern version of the Middle Ages. As I'm old-fashioned I don't think that's a good idea, but folks don't tend to care about general good ideas if they find them personally unpleasant in some way, that's another recent trend.
Oh, I had to become familiar with Emmy Noether BTW, when you do Particle Physics it's hard not to. I can write down the two versions of her most famous theorem we referred to. I think the less useful one was nicely left for you to learn about from a review by Hill from 1951, but I'd have to look it up.
The great thing about having seen grown the Internet when gopher was awe inspiring as a teenager is that you know how to work with books, paper and your memory plus you know all the tricks after having been googling for 22 years. You're also aware of lots of stuff that isn't online yet and where to find it physically. Pretty cool huh? Too bad that's dying.
Do you know anything interesting about say Artin's algebra books now that we've been talking about Emmy? For instance why I'm mentioning Artin? What about that famous Hilbert's actually feminist quip involving Emmy's application? That would have been nice upper level general knowledge for instance, not limited to STEM people.
Well I insist it does because the first thing anyone with enough intellectual humility to get beyond utter ignorance would be to look up who this guy everyone is talking about was instead of repeating ad nauseam that they don't know anything about him, so this can't be objectively relevant.
What information gives that to anyone except the empty personal feelings of someone who needs to post something just because? I see this a lot lately, and it's just frankly boring noise, of the whiny kind.
And then goes with name-dropping and stating that people who can talk about popular culture can't possibly know anything high-brow, which it even isn't in this case (high-brow might be for instance Adorno's book on Mahler to give an example I could barely follow). It's utter ignorance assuming that everyone you're prejudiced against for inane reasons can't possibly be perchance better educated than you are, could you imagine, oh the horror. There are several varieties of utter ignorance at play here IMO.
Gotcha. I only meant the sheer fact that he didn't know who he was, was not in itself anything that makes him ignorant. But yes, it was his response/reaction to discovering the story of this "mysterious" person that indeed took a surprising turn. Thanks for clarifying.
