Getting to a point where realistically you're not able to know something deeply but then still use it is pretty frightening.

When I say deeply I don't necessarily mean that for every device you need to know about all of its atoms, but to have a pretty good framework for how the thing works deterministically, and how it can fail.

That was my point, exactly.

This now applies to most things in modern industrial society. We operate our daily lives at a crazy high level of abstraction. I think for a lot of us on HN, we "know too much about what we don't know", and that is ... overwhelming.

Funny enough, most people are actually able to operate at these higher levels of abstraction without worrying too much, because they don't know enough about what they don't know.