I think about this sort of thing a lot, especially in regards to software. What is one's level of understanding of a system? Of the general architectural principles of similar systems in general? In software we still have incredibly crude tools to describe architecture which typically gloss over almost all relevant details. Between the raw source code and your typical multi-layer diagram there is a gulf of understanding and missed opportunity. Biology has an even worse problem, with even more complicated machinery that is even more difficult to understand (you can't simply step through code in a debugger to see what it's doing, and the "code" was evolved so you don't even really know what the operations are (such as gene expression and suppression)).
I think about this sort of thing a lot, especially in regards to software. What is one's level of understanding of a system? Of the general architectural principles of similar systems in general? In software we still have incredibly crude tools to describe architecture which typically gloss over almost all relevant details. Between the raw source code and your typical multi-layer diagram there is a gulf of understanding and missed opportunity. Biology has an even worse problem, with even more complicated machinery that is even more difficult to understand (you can't simply step through code in a debugger to see what it's doing, and the "code" was evolved so you don't even really know what the operations are (such as gene expression and suppression)).