What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

I was just perusing Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice and wondering, not for the first time, what I would include if I were to make a list like that. What have I learned over my 67 years that I might pass on to a younger person in hopes of helping them avoid having to learn the same lessons the hard way?

Here’s the first thing that came to mind: If you find yourself wishing that a piece of software were able to do something it doesn’t do, assume that it does do that thing and that you simply don’t know how to access that feature. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had the thought while using a computer program that it really should be able to do X, only to discover later — sometimes years later — that it was able to do X all along, and I just assumed it couldn’t.

As life lessons go, that one feels fairly lightweight, and maybe not even worthy of a blog post. But as I thought about it some more, it occurred to me that there might be a deeper lesson: that we human beings tend to assume that if we don’t know how to do something, it can’t be done. How many times have we gotten stuck because we didn’t see a path forward, and assumed that meant there wasn’t one?

And perhaps the lesson is even deeper than that: that we tend to assume that we already know all there is to know about any particular subject — or more precisely, that we already know everything that’s important to know about it.

I suspect that this inclination is responsible for a huge portion of the stupidity in the world. Stupidity is not ignorance; it’s proceeding on the assumption that we’re not ignorant when, in fact, we are. It’s what makes it possible for white people to explain to black people what it’s like to be black, or for rich people to lecture poor people about how they should deal with their poverty.

So perhaps the advice is something like this:

When you get stuck, assume there’s something you don’t know…

No, scratch that — that’s too narrow. That suggests resorting to intellectual humility only as a last resort. Let’s go with this instead:

At all times and under all circumstances, assume there’s something you don’t know, the knowing of which would make a difference.