I Don't Know

I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance by Leah Hager Cohen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Drawing on the insights of science and literature, this essay explores the power of admitting ignorance - and why it is so difficult to do so.

It's a short book, barely 72 pages long, and packed with the titles of other books to explore if you're fascinated by the topic of ignorance and the limits of human knowledge. There are intense social pressures to appear knowledgeable - pressures that even small children feel, though a failure to admit ignorance often spreads more darkness than light.

With anecdotes ranging from "The Emperor's New Clothes" to the recordings of a downed plane's little black box, Cohen illustrates the dangers of pretending to know when you don't. She brings together numerous sources in an interesting way, and it is clear that, with the recent insights of modern neuroscience and psychology, we seem to be getting a picture of exactly how little we know.

You should flip through Cohen's book with pen in hand to write down titles. But one she doesn't mention, Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein, is another short book that looks at the subject from the perspective of a scientist. Opposing Cohen's willingness to admit ignorance is the clever book-length essay How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, which makes the argument that a little knowledge can go a long way. Finally, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, explores our endless human tendency toward self-justification.

Quotable:

"Over time, he lamented, we lose our openness. [Ashley] Montagu attributed this in part to conventional schooling, which he blamed for squashing a love of knowledge. 'School, instead of being a magic casement which opens on unending vistas of excitement, has become a restrictive, linear, one-dimensional, only too often narrowing, experience and to many a dead loss.' By the time formal education stops, around early adulthood for most people, 'it is as though they believed that they had learned all they needed to know,' he wrote. 'At this time they begin to grow a shell around this pitiful store of knowledge and wisdom; from then on they vigorously resist all attempts to pierce that shell with anything new.' Montagu called this process psychoschlerosis, the hardening of the mind, and cited it as the reason most adults 'draw back from the unfamiliar, perhaps because they are reluctant to reveal ignorance.'" - 19

"That our intuition could lead us astray is troubling in direct proportion to the degree of trust we place in it. The solution would seem to be: Don't be overly trusting. Mix in a healthy dose of skepticism. But suppose we don't have a say in the matter? Suppose we're hardwired to trust - to believe in - our instincts, regardless of whether they're right? Suddenly the problem of not knowing becomes a lot more complicated." - 29

Ignorance

Ignorance: How it drives science by Stuart Firestein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a short essay with case studies by scientist Stuart Firestein about the power of ignorance in advancing scientific knowledge and inquiry. Firestein suggests that the right kind of ignorance is actually more important to scientists than factual knowledge. The facts may mislead us, or be themselves wrong: therefore being able to ask the right questions is essential.

Firestein discusses what he calls strategies of ignorance, which scientists use to help them decide where to start looking for new knowledge. He ends the book with four brief and fascinating case studies in very different fields that all indicate the new frontiers of ignorance that scientists are broaching. It's all written to illuminate the process of scientific inquiry to laypeople. For a taste of the book, check out his 2013 TED Talk "Celebrating Ignorance".

The first connection I made while reading was to a book I often think of: So Many Books by Gabriel Said. It's another small punch in the gut, giving me a powerful sense of the scale of my own ignorance of an area I know a lot about: literature and book publishing.

Reading Ignorance and So Many Books as a librarian whose job it is to "find the answers", was a helpful reminder about the vagaries of human knowledge. Highly trained scientists spend their entire careers working on problems that may or may not have solutions - but no one will know until someone is curious enough to look. In reference librarianship, the first thing you are taught is how to conduct a reference interview to get at the patron's real question, which is almost never the first thing they ask. (Finding the real question, in fact, often takes longer than finding the answer.)

Firestein points to a microhistory by Mary Poovey called A History of the Modern Fact, which is another good follow-up for those interested in how we came to our modern definition of knowledge.

Quotable:

"Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting." - 10

"Curiously, as our collective knowledge grows, our ignorance does not seem to shrink. Rather, we know an ever smaller amount of the total, and our individual ignorance, as a ratio of the knowledge base, grows." - 13

"Libraries are both awe inspiring and depressing. The cultural effort they represent, to record over generations what we know and think about the world and ourselves, is unquestionably majestic, but the impossibility of reading even a small fraction of the books inside them can be personally dispiriting." - 14

"The universe is not deterministic; it is probabilistic, and the future can't be predicted with certainty." - 36

"This is an example of why the brain is so poor an instrument for understanding how it works - at least through introspection. You can think about it all you want, and you will never get access to what your brain is doing computationally at any given moment. You only have access to a result, a behavior or perception, that could have been reached in numerous indistinguishable ways." - 147

"We often use the word ignorance to denote a primitive or foolish set of beliefs. In fact, I would say that 'explanation' is often primitive or foolish, and the recognition of ignorance is the beginning of scientific discourse. When we admit that something is unknown and inexplicable, then we admit that it is worthy of investigation." - 167