the two piles

If somebody boils away all the complexities of knowledge and its accruement over the millennia, and the places from which this knowledge was identified and cultivated, one can arrive at a very basic conclusion concerning the topic of knowledge. I have tentatively titled this the Two Piles Theory, and it states the following: 

1. At the root of all things are two piles, one being the Known, the other being the Unknown
   1. The Known, although constantly growing, is by definition finite. Even though it is growing, if I was to pause the process of learning, I could count individually the pieces of information in the Known pile. 
   2. The Unknown is infinite. 
2. The process of learning is the taking of things from the Unknown pile and adding them to the Known pile. 
   1. There are two types of learning: standard learning and pure learning
      1. Standard learning is the learning of information which has already been learned by others. Almost the entirety of education is based on standard learning, as the education system exists to pass down predefined knowledge to the new generation
      2. Pure learning is the learning of information that has not yet been discovered by others. Pure learning is usually restricted to the realm of research and innovation. 

Why is this theory at all important? In my opinion, it is because it helps provide a solution to the fear of the unknown. I, among many others, was consistently daunted by a fear of the unknown in many different situations. Fears of the unknown are some of the biggest things stopping people from doing things, from applying to jobs to romantically approaching someone, and so on. I found that if I boiled it down to this concept of taking from one pile to the other, I began to see the unknown differently. It became less daunting to me, and I began to instead understand it as a sort of natural resource, in the same way a fisherman may see an ocean as a source of fish. Given that perspective, I flipped from being afraid of the unknown to almost wanting to wade into it. I say almost because I preserved a wariness about it: there is are right, responsible and efficient ways to reach into the unknown, and there are destructive, irresponsible and ruinous ways to reach into the unknown. With this perspective in mind, my fear of the unknown transformed into a kind of respect, and in turn that made me less anxious about trying new things.