What's the right measure?

How much does a person really know?  A lot or a little or somewhere in between? 

It's virtually impossible to know.  Tests  have been designed to attempt the answer to that question, but they fall very short in measuring what the human mind uses as knowledge and have no predictive power about how a person will create or react in given situations, under duress, or in relationships. Love in the Wild, Survivor, and  Bachelorette are as good a test for measuring these ideas as specially designed tests are.

I suppose a person could say that one should check her/his grades in school.  That suggestion is the most laughable of all solutions.  If you are talking about college, everyone knows that professors have to give grades according to a Bell curve.  In addition, only about 25% of the population graduate from college, so the comparison is not how much one might know against the general population, but how much memorization or  knowledge from practicum one can reproduce in comparison to others who want to mortgage their futures in pursuit of a certain level of a quality life.  It is even more absurd on the high school level.  Teachers are forbidden to give less than a 50, so automatically the grading field is reduced to 50 points from 100.  That means a 70 isn't 70% any longer, but is the 40% marker in a 50 point grading field.  Students graduating with a 70 (or a 65 that teachers magically turn into 70 to move the student through the grade level) are really, really subpar.

One could compare financial income assuming that the people who know more make more money.  But knowledge doesn't work like that.  Given that hard work can substitute for knowledge in the workplace, or connections to the right people can substitute for knowledge, it is impossible to look at the tax return and determine how much a person knows.  There is also the lack of equivalence among work fields.  If one works in a "hot" field such as computer programming, natural language analysis, geophysics, petroleum engineering, actuarial tables, medicine and the like, then (s)he makes much more than public servants with the same experience, education, number of connections, and desire.

Life experience is a pretty good teacher, I would have to say.  So maybe the best way to know how much one knows is not to compare oneself against people but against previous experience.  How much better does one react to life's situations?  How much better does a person create, preparing for potential situations?  How much fear or courage does one have in making it through unknown situations?  Then, maybe one can know how much knowledge has been gained.

If true, I would like to think that experience prepares one to make great decisions given cumulative effect.  So, instead of grades, money, or tests, a much truer measure of how much a person knows is performance after a catalyst.  That (catalysts) is what makes people creative, or determined, or courageous, or failing, or recovering, or contented, or happy.  Catalysts come in many, many forms.  Sometimes a catalyst is a difficult time.  At other times a catalyst is having a simple conversation with someone because the way becomes clear after talking.

I have a good idea of how much I know because I can predict now what catalysts might be lurking around the next corner when I used to be surprised a lot.  Some catalysts I have imagined and never had to face.  Other catalysts have repeated themselves a few times, so I know what to expect and when to expect them.  Some catalysts are even hoped for.  I have one of those catalysts.  It's more of a craving.  If it happens, I would be the most knowledgeable I have ever been in my life... and the most satisfied.