The author is not talking about the same standard. "Knowing what you're doing" means that you're familiar with a situation and you know exactly the correct cour

The author is not talking about the same standard. "Knowing what you're doing" means that you're familiar with a situation and you know exactly the correct course of action. This is not the case for most things in adult life (especially politics), in which every problem is a new problem, for which you use heuristics to converge to a solution, that isn't perfect, but at least tries something out.