belle
tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior
marc-lluís vives, oriel feldmanhall 2018
doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04631-9
information avoidance
russell golman, david hagmann, george loewenstein 2017
doi.org/10.1257/jel.20151245
you don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to
daniel denicola 2018
aeon.co/ideas/you-dont-have-a-right-to-believe-whatever-you-want-to
hypocognition: making sense of the world beyond one’s conceptual reach
wu, k., & dunning, d 2018 pdf
doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000126
Does Action Require Meaning?
But our discussion of hypocognition leads to a rather pointed question: To act, do people necessarily need meaning? As our Fijian example about pregnant women and toxic fish suggests, significant actions at times may require no explicit meaning or rationale for people to guide people to execute them (Henrich & Henrich, 2010). Our discussion of Gettier cases suggests, too, that actions may follow from spurious or mistaken understandings of circumstances that just happen to lead to adaptive behavior.
After all, across human history, people have lived their lives just fine without the aid of concepts we enjoy in our modern life.
abstract People think, feel, and behave within the confines of what they can conceive. Outside that conceptual landscape, people exhibit hypocognition (i.e., lacking cognitive or linguistic representations of concepts to describe ideas or explicate experiences). We review research on the implications of hypocognition for cognition and behavior. Drawing on the expertise and cross-cultural literatures, we describe how hypocognition impoverishes one’s mental world, leaving cognitive deficits in recognition, explanation, and memory while fueling social chauvinism and conflict in political and cultural spheres. Despite its pervasive consequences, people cannot be expected to identify when they are in a hypocognitive state, mistaking what they conceive for the totality of all that there is. To the extent that their channel of knowledge becomes too narrow, people risk submitting to hypocognition’s counterpart, hypercognition (i.e., the mistaken overapplication of other available conceptual notions to issues outside their actual relevance).
unknown unknowns: the problem of hypocognition
kaidi wu, david dunning 2018
we wander about the unknown terrains of life, complacent about what we know and oblivious to what we miss
blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/unknown-unknowns-the-problem-of-hypocognition
jumping to conclusions: implications for reasoning errors, false belief, knowledge corruption, and impeded learning
sanchez, carmen and dunning, david 2021
psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/pspp0000375
the unknowers: how strategic ignorance rules the world
linsey mcgoey 2019
Where the philosophers of the enlightenment pointed to their own mental faculties to emancipate themselves from feudal rule, I suggest we can point to the limits of those faculties to reclaim democratic rights in today’s increasingly plutocratic age.
don’t presume that to unknow is nihilistic. Don’t presume that to unknow is to challenge the value of truth. Rather, this book calls for trust in the power of revolutionary ignorance, to marvel, like enlightenment thinkers in the past, in the possibilities of daring to unknow.
An honest expert can be used for malicious ends, not by exploiting her knowledge, but by relying on her ignorance. This is because if the expert doesn’t know something, it becomes plausible to insist that a phenomenon is not real, regardless of how many non-experts insist that it is. Experts, in other words, can be useful authorities on ignorance.
The greats have a knowledge-based advantage that I argue tends to be overlooked. They have the fundamental, inalienable capacity to point out the limits of the strongs and the smarts’ claims to possess special enlightenment. This capacity is inalienable because elite ignorance is inalienable. There is always something that the smarts and strongs do not know.
The inescapable fact of elite ignorance functions as a perpetual weapon of resistance for the greats. It also points to the emancipative potential of ignorance, and the way that illuminating the ignorance of elites can foster positive change
Writing in the 1770s, Paine called attention to the ignorance of Britain’s rulers to encourage Americans in their fight for independence. ‘Men who look upon themselves born to reign,’ he writes, are ‘early poisoned by importance.’ He goes on: ‘the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have little opportunity of knowing its true interest’ – their governance decisions tend to be ‘most ignorant and unfit of any.’
Paine doesn’t use the term ‘elite ignorance,’ but his meaning is similar to mine – although I add a twist. Paine introduces a common understanding of elite ignorance – the challenge of understanding hardships faced by less powerful groups. I agree this is a serious problem, but I define elite ignorance differently. I see it as the superior capacity to exploit ignorance to command greater institutional, individual and class-based advantages.
Steven Pinker, in his recent bestseller Enlightenment Now, also turns to the late 18th century, but I argue that he gets Adam Smith wrong, and also that his historical omissions are pregnant with meaning. What Pinker doesn’t say about Smith helps me to examine where the myth of America and Britain’s laissez-faire origins have come from, and why those myths still thrive today.
limiting abuses of power by the government. But importantly, they were also preoccupied with limiting and punishing harm inflicted on the public by private stakeholders as well, especially the growing class of merchants taking advantage of new banking, industry and trade opportunities. The problem of corporate harm is one of the reasons why early political economists such as Smith, Burke and Tocqueville called for government regulation of industry activities.
Today, their beliefs have been turned upside-down; Smith and his followers have been romanticized as being far more laissez-faire than they actually were, a tendency that helps to confer respectability today on the illiberal ideas of later economists who espouse more extreme forms of market fundamentalism than Smith ever voiced himself.
This book is the first to examine the role of strategic and elite ignorance in distorting the legacy of Smith and his peers.
Miranda Fricker describes as ‘testimonial injustice,’ the tendency for some individuals to experience credibility deficits – the undervaluing of a person’s ability to understand or prescribe a sound course of action in a given situation. Fricker contrasts the notion of credibility deficit with credibility excess, the tendency to be perceived as especially intelligent or authoritative even if one has no right to be judged so.
It is inaccurate to suggest that concern over indigenous rights is merely a recent phenomenon, but many people, including celebrated scholars, do still argue this position. What renders their view of the past compelling is not the scope of their gaze but the convenience of their narrowness. To maintain that narrowness, believers must choose not to explore or admit facts that could destabilize a narrative they wish to see as inalterable. They must become masters of the unknown.
even smart people use data selectively. Even smart people can be elite agnotologists, a point that J.S. Mill made of Bentham: ‘There is hardly anything in Bentham’s philosophy which is not true. The bad part of his writings is his resolute denial of all that he does not see, of all truths but those which he recognises.’
external forces always shape personal ignorance. Social taboos shape decisions over which truths are shared publicly and which truths are shamed into silence; and social power (as well as the socially powerful) sets agendas for what is known and what is not known.
The strength of different organizations – social, economic, cultural – is often reliant on not articulating the ways that internal practices conflict with public perceptions of the organization’s activities. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it well: ‘in any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.’
Many branches of philosophy and international relations continue to see 18th- and 19th-century political and economic liberalism as projects of ‘inclusion,’ devoted to extending human rights universally, rather than confront a harsher truth: that 19th-century liberalism was actually an illiberal period of continued conquest, including the British perpetuation of the ‘coolie trade,’ which led to the forced abduction and enslavement of tens of thousands of indentured workers from India and China. This occurred even as prominent philosophers at home such as J.S. Mill publicly praised Britain’s exceptionality as a nation that abhorred slavery.
The idea that we should view ignorance as ‘greater’ than knowledge still strikes many people as doubtful, alarming, cynical, defeatist or simply stupid. But recognition of the power of ignorance is anything but irrational. The utility of ignorance as a tool of power is that it is a tool of reason. Once this point is accepted, it opens up new channels of social scientific investigation, because ‘ignorance’ becomes easier to see.
‘oracular power’ is a much bigger phenomenon than simply a few isolated examples of historical censorship. It’s about different institutions and individuals being widely treated as possessing special enlightenment and almost mystical authority, even in secular societies.
Hannah Arendt used to refer to this type of rhetorical authority as ‘pseudo-mysticism,’ and I suggest the problem may be worsening today.
what sets apart the strongs and the smarts camps is the strategic, oracular exploitation of ignorance to explicitly defend anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian policies. In democracies, the problem of ignorance is acknowledged to be a shared problem, whereas in autocratic societies, ignorance tends to be derided as a problem limited to the masses, one that elite rulers alone have the superior capacity to overcome.
One of the main arguments in this book is that it’s a delusion to see ignorance in this way, as a problem solely or even mostly limited to poor or to uneducated voters, but it is also a very seductive delusion, especially at times when the electorate seems to make ill-informed decisions.
The smarts camp is my term for anti-democrat thinkers who advance the authoritarian idea of ‘rule by knowers,’ pointing to political surveys of ‘voter ignorance’ as a justification for stripping voting rights from men and women living in western democracies today.
The strongs, on the other hand, often leverage ignorance in a more general way, exploiting the fact that the future is genuinely unknown (Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’) as a rationale for obtaining information in intrusive and violent ways, such as through torture, as Donald Trump has done.
rooted in the ‘notion that higher class means higher integrity,’ as the journalist Sarah Smarsh has observed. She calls for more balanced reporting about the class origins of xenophobia and racism in the United States. ‘Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right,’ she writes, adding that a ‘steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trump’s campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.
Smith here identifies a form of ‘micro-ignorance,’ a behavioural pattern discernible at the individual level that compounds societal-level macro-ignorance. In this case, his astute insight is to see that it’s the large numbers of workers that renders their organizing more conspicuous, while merchants can rely on their smaller numbers to evade notice, even though their organizing exerts greater influence.
‘Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour,’ Smith adds. He saw that collusion among businessmen is a truth that is both self-evident and ignored, a sort of ‘useful unknown,’ and he berates his peers for wrongly assuming that the absence of clear corruption is proof that no corruption has occurred.
Smith makes short work of this type of observation – the earnest but hapless scientist who mistakes a lack of evidence as evidence a phenomenon can’t exist: ‘We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.’
The deliberate cutting of sections where Smith writes at length about the necessity of government intervention is an example of what I mean by elite ignorance, because it proves that what people today don’t know about Smith isn’t simply accidental, but rather results from the biases of earlier scholars who are influential in shaping what future generations understand about the past. It is ignorance born from too much narrow knowledge rather than simply a lack of information. And also, importantly, this example shows that it tends to be outsiders who lack specialist knowledge about a topic who can spot anomalies with a historical record, a point emphasized to me by Sutherland during an email interview that I carried out with her.
‘I saw the flaws in the presentation and celebration of Smith’s argument as the founding document of the modern discipline of economics because I could not lay claim to the economist’s narrow expertise,’ Sutherland told me.
If you read on, beyond Books One to Three of the Wealth of Nations, into those parts almost never represented in modern selected editions, it becomes clear that Smith foresaw negative consequences to unfettered economic growth; that for Smith the moral economy still mattered. Female economists, of whom there have been a few over the intervening centuries, often seem to grasp that point, but it has been widely ignored in a predominantly male specialism.
It is a very good point, but while gender plays some role, it can’t explain all. Writing in 1952, the British economist Lionel Robbins suggested that to call Adam Smith a laissez faire thinker ‘is a sure sign of ignorance or malice.’
In other words, women have been at the forefront of a more accurate understanding of Smith’s writing. But a small but vocal minority of male economists within the mainstream also tried to challenge doctrinaire interpretations of Smith and yet still failed to dislodge conventional wisdom.
The speed of her fall from grace is telling: Wollstonecraft’s ideas carried authority only when she concealed her identity. A pseudonym is a type of micro-ignorance that reveals larger truths about inequality in societies that value a woman’s insights only when her identity is veiled.
In her rebuttal to Burke, she is one of the first modern writers to articulate the problem known today as confirmation bias, the favoring of facts that support earlier assumptions. ‘When we read a book that supports our favourite opinions, how eagerly do we suck in the doctrines,’ she writes, ‘But when, on the contrary, we peruse a skilful writer, with whom we do not coincide in opinion, how attentive is the mind to detect fallacy.’39 Everyone does it, she emphasizes, but Burke’s problem is that he doesn’t realize he does it.
Her originality is still neglected, her primacy ceded to men who made her same points after she did. The dulling of Wollstonecraft’s legacy contributes to the devaluing of women more generally; even today, most university students are taught – wrongly – that the most original political thinkers of the enlightenment were all men.
Wollstonecraft is remembered today, but more for her path-breaking Rights of Woman essay published in 1792 and less for her equally path-breaking rebuttal to Burke.
History has accomplished what her critics wanted: they have limited her legacy to women’s rights, which is only half-correct, obscuring the economic liberty that she wanted for women and men both.
The significance of this point is not simply that Wollstonecraft’s life illustrates the effacement of women thinkers from history, but rather that her effacement raises larger truths about the way that narrow history and rigid academic theories makes it possible for erroneous theories about economic exchange to reign in the present.
The reluctance to investigate the limits of one’s own ideology is a problem all humans share. The great 19th-century political philosophers John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor wrote about this very problem in the famous essay On Liberty – the way that people’s worst errors often stem from unwitting ignorance, from the tyranny of social or intellectual conventions that we fail to recognize as constraints.
‘rule by knowers’ leads to a contraction of knowledge rather than an expansion of knowledge because elite rulers face no checks on the spread of their own ignorance.
J.S. Mill wasn’t alone in recognizing this problem. Wollstonecraft and, in our times, from the end of WWII onward, the philosophers Charles Mills, Audre Lorde and John Gray do as well. I want to emphasize one other figure: the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper, a critic of authoritarianism who suggested that blind, naïve faith that society is inevitably progressing to a more positive future can lead even the most educated people to have a bias towards optimism when analysing the social and the natural world.
Worried by anti-democratic fascism on the right and totalitarian Stalinism on left, he called on his peers to avoid the ‘spell of Plato’: the deluded belief that an unelected set of wise noblemen are more knowledgeable than democratic representatives of the people. Popper suggests that Plato’s vision of elite rule leads to the development of a ‘caste state’ where freedom of thought is spurned and knowledge degenerates, starved of the oxygen supplied by a diverse constituency of both knowers and unknowers – people who sense flaws within an existent paradigm and are able to convince ‘knowers’ of the illusion of their certainties.
Over the years, a handful of influential thinkers have tried to spur more attention to the problem of ignorance in economics and political affairs. The economist John Maynard Keynes was right to point out ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.’16
But he didn’t detail the mechanism of ignorance transmission in any systematic fashion. Libraries are filled with studies of knowledge production, but the study of ignorance production is in its infancy.
Frédéric Bastiat, a 19th-century thinker and classical economic liberal, wrote about the problem of the ‘unseen’ in political economy. He was inspired particularly by Rousseau, who, as Bastiat put it, ‘never spoke more truly than when he said: It takes a great deal of scientific insight to discern the facts that are closest to us.’
George Orwell reiterated the point when he famously observed, ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’
These are compelling but also obvious points in a way: we know that people struggle to accept inconvenient facts, and we also have a good idea of why (Upton Sinclair’s adage applies: ‘it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it’).
Keynes said as much when he suggested the main flaw with mainstream economic theory was that ‘its tacit assumptions are seldom or never satisfied, with the result that it cannot solve the economics problems of the actual world.’
An important representative of the historical economics school flourishing over the 19th century is Friedrich List, who was once seen as a visionary economist on a par with Ricardo and Smith, but whose ideas long ago fell from fashion.
List is probably the first great student of strategic ignorance in economics. He didn’t use the word ‘agnotology,’ but he did accuse his predecessors of dangerous dogmatism that led them to ignore inconvenient facts, including Smith, who he thinks deliberately misconstrues the historical record, buffing his theory of free trade to make it shinier for others.
I think List is unfair because most of the buffing happened after Smith died. List misses an important split between Smith and his followers since, the fact that Wealth of Nations is a fact-based effort to understand market activity as it actually unfolds in practice, no matter how ugly, and it was ugly, so ugly, in fact that, Smith was under no illusions that his vision of fair trade could ever be realized perfectly.
Trade could never be fully equal because malfeasance is not always seen. But he wanted the state, the judiciary and the public to be vigilant towards the practices of businessmen. He wanted a sort of rights economy: a form of exchange that draws on governmental power to protect individual liberty – the liberty of the poor as well as the rich. To understand the distortion of Smith’s greatest insights we need to understand the distortion of 19th and 20th-century history.
“Tocqueville is a free trader, but unlike today’s free traders, he doesn’t think free trade means immunity from government regulations.
Why? Because he saw that people are at risk of death and poor health if corporations are not regulated. In his words, private industry can
… endanger the health, even the life, of those who make money out of it or who are employed therein. Therefore the industrial classes, more than other classes, need rules, supervision, and restraint, and it naturally follows that the functions of government multiply as they multiply.
Like Smith and Wollstonecraft before him and Keynes after him, he was critical of corporate impunity – pointing out that individual businessmen tended to unite into all sorts of new industry associations (‘new corporate bodies,’ as he put it) that are ‘stronger and more redoubtable than any private person could be and that they have less responsibility than the latter for their acts.’
To Tocqueville’s mind, this responsibility burden needed to be reversed. Rather than corporations being used as a shield enabling people to avoid personal responsibility for harms to others, he called for corporations to be granted ‘less independence from the power of society than would be proper in the case of an individual.’13
And if they’re not? If corporate power continued to trump individual freedom? In his view, the corporate threat to individual liberty was grave. He adds a last, rather chilling warning about the power of big business. It’s a prescient warning in light of growing concerns about the erosion of democratic rights in America.
He suggests that as citizens either choose or are compelled to focus their energies on their private work, they might lose interest in the science of government: they might simply look away. And while they’re not looking, a threat could gain force: the possibility of their government being either seized, or simply handed over willingly, to ‘one irresponsible man or body of men. Of all the forms that democratic despotism might take, that would assuredly be the worst.’
He viewed the rise and dominance of private industry as one of the roads a democratic people might walk towards their own ‘servitude.’ He was gloomy but he was a practical man too, and he suggested that two things can help to prevent this possibility. To keep their government free of corruption or complete tyranny, a democratic people have two aces up their sleeve: a free press and a free judiciary. Control over a people, he insists, cannot be ‘complete if the press is free. The press is, par excellence, the democratic weapon of freedom. Something analogous may be said of judicial power.’
the reality of plummeting worker wages while his profits soared points to prescience of Adam Smith’s point (Marx said something similar, but Smith said it first): there is an inherent conflict between workers and owners; it’s in the interests of owners to pretend this conflict doesn’t exist – and only the gullible take businesspeople at their word.
strategic ignorance is a tactic that is most successful when it is least detectable. The ability to hide the fact that people did have the means to inform themselves of illegality is what makes the tactic of strategic ignorance the powerful resource that it is.
the effort to expose strategic ignorance, to draw attention to palpable problems is, quite perversely, treated as the most inexcusable act. Exposing problems is often more personally dangerous than quietly perpetuating them.
people can be blinded by their own narrow expertise, and also the flipside of this problem, the fact that people’s individual experience can often lead to radical new ways to understand and to resolve different social or political problems
Democracy is a superior system of government not simply because it is more inherently just, but because it is epistemologically superior to other forms of governance. It is epistemologically superior, in Popper’s view, because it is the only system of government that prevents a permanent hierarchy of rulers from imposing their rigid, class-bounded notion of the good life onto other people, either intentionally or not.
the belief that knowledge can’t always be ranked, especially because it’s impossible to know in the present which theories will turn out to be discredited or disputed in future.
The irony of the legacy of the one of the greatest economists of the 20th-century is that while he [Hayek] made his name making excellent points about ‘pretence of knowledge,’ he was quietly creating ignorance alibis for himself and his friends. Hayek was always trying to avoid a paper trail. He constantly tried to make it seem as if he and his peers were not dependent on corporate funding, even when they were.
Having the resources to practice such beneficence,’ Immanuel Kant wrote, ‘is, for the most part, a result of certain human beings being favoured through the injustice of government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence. Under such circumstances, does a rich man’s help to the needy, on which he so readily prides himself as something meritorious, really deserve to be called beneficence at all?
new ideologies have solidified, calcifying the hubris of people who think they know more than they do, that the whole world is fine because their world is fine, that any problems rest with the ignorance of others and not the limits of their own ideological positions. Hannah Arendt warned about this problem: ‘Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process – the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future – because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.
Orwell’s warnings about all-knowing rulers in his novel 1984, where he points out that it is the capacity to monopolize human greatness and to appear all-knowing that enables authoritarianism to take hold: ‘Big brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership.
Smith’s call for ‘suspicious attention’ to any group which purports that its own monopoly over a set of resources will serve the common good, whether it’s a monopoly over the economic resources or a monopoly over political knowledge.
Smith’s own life story is one of the clearest illustrations of the error of epistocracy because the reception of his work shows the hazard of using any academic test to ‘prove’ that someone is more knowledgeable than another person. Which version of Smith is likely to turn up on a test of voter knowledge in the 2020s, or 2040s, or 2060s? No matter what that question is, it is easy to imagine the ‘right’ answer: that he disapproves of government regulation, but is it true?
The answer is: sometimes. The lie is that he sides with either an anti-regulatory or pro-regulatory stance exclusively – that he could see only one side of the truth.
wasn’t even Smith’s greatest insight, the fact that businessmen can lie and cheat to get ahead. His bigger point is that we all do it, convincing ourselves that an action or a truth is morally righteous when it’s not. And his greatest insight was that the problem can be countered – that it’s possible for individuals to expand their own narrow understanding, deliberately enlarging our perspective to understand how our behaviour affects others.
Greats are defined by perspectival enlargement, by the capacity to imagine one’s circumstances differently and the human will and capacity to do so.
Strongs or smarts may hold or seize political power, but they can never be ‘greats’ because they deny other people their capacity for free will. Smarts and strongs appreciate the value of human liberty but only for themselves, or for people who look like them or who act like them. This is why strongs and smarts often prefer a narrow reading of history, because recognition of the greatness of others threatens the intactness of their ideology.
lost their effort to ensure the statues of their ancestors stand in perpetuity, and this loss terrifies them, because with their loss comes a weakening of their dominion over the future.
elite power functions through strategic ignorance – through the ability to select which voices to acknowledge and which to dismiss.
The more power that any particular group accumulates, the more they tend to necessarily rely on strategic ignorance in order to meet various goals, exploiting different types of ‘ignorance alibis’ that enable the powerful to maintain that their power does not cause harm to other groups even when it does.
And yet, the superior capacity to exploit strategic ignorance cannot be maintained forever, because the inescapable fact of elite ignorance means that the less powerful have an inalienable ability to question the knowledge of the few. The oracular power to determine the boundaries of what ‘counts’ as knowledge is powerful but not impregnable, because knowledge itself is always imperfect. Knowledge is always a pretence of sorts: Hayek was right about that.
The powerful and the weak always both unknow, and it is only autocracies – only ‘rule by knowers’ – that insist otherwise, claiming wrongly that a ruler has a special right to rule based on special enlightenment. This claim is always false, because elites also unknow, often in ways they don’t realize.
Elite ignorance is valuable for the less powerful. This might strike some people as a surprising point or even an excuse for bad behaviour, especially given how often the powerful can and do exploit ignorance to avoid liability for actions that harm others. But seen in a different light, ignorance can become a tool of emancipation. Ignorance can be emancipative because it reminds us that to not know is incontestably a universally shared human trait.
The fact that ignorance grows in tandem with new knowledge is the reason why we are, at the individual level, equal unknowers. People do have more or less knowledge or intelligence than other people, but often it is this very strength, one’s superior knowledge, that can be the main hindrance to perceiving one’s own ignorance.
It is not possible to either measure or to rank individual ignorance.
This may seem cynical, but it’s not, because while the terrible problem of our ignorance can undermine the effort to perceive and to treat each other as equals, it’s also the power of human ignorance that guarantees that no one person or group can ever maintain their dominance over others in perpetuity. The ignorance of a dominant group always shows – a ruler’s ignorance always shows – permitting a weaker group to exploit that ignorance to their advantage. The inalienable nature of human ignorance is emancipatory because it furnishes for all the ability to question the wisdom of the few.
If the similarities between Lorde and Smith aren’t clear, consider the words of feminist scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who argues that ‘solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their oppression.’
For all his many limitations, Adam Smith was capable of this type of solidarity, and it led him to consider the subjugation of workers, including their lack of a right to education, in a new light. He and Wollstonecraft were among the first greats of the modern age to call on the state to provide public education at a time when the ‘right’ to education was considered a laughable, impossible indulgence.
Think too about Smith’s comment, that only an ignorant person can maintain that collusion among business merchants doesn’t exist as long as it’s not seen. His solution was to look harder. And Lorde’s point was to talk louder. She argued that silence is not an option, even when one’s life is at threat, even when the future implications can’t be known, because that’s usually when speaking out is needed most – when the danger is most unknowable.
Smith and Lorde’s points are similar to each other because both recognized that the greatness of being human is to see and to speak when it is least in one’s self-interest to do so, even when others may deride or try to harm you, which is a constant danger given that it’s typically those articulating uncomfortable truths who tend to be most resented in any given social setting.
It is the courage of the unsilent that pierces the ignorance alibi of the few, making an ignorance alibi untenable over the long term.
The Lord(e) principle is this: the power of human unknowing is unlimitable and will break even the strongest oppression.
the great unknown: seven journeys to the frontiers of science
marcus du sautoy 2017
“At the interview I was told that there would be occasions where I would be called upon to defend the decisions of a minister and how would I feel about that? I said that I would never under any circumstances deny a fact. On the other hand, I’m fairly good at the kind of debating competition where you’re given a topic and according to a flip of a coin you’ve got to argue for either side of the debate. So I said I’d be happy explaining why the minister’s choice was arrived at. I simply wouldn’t agree to endorse it if it wasn’t right.”
A typical mathematician’s response. Set up the minister’s axioms and then demonstrate the proof that led to the conclusion—a judgment-free approach. That’s not to say that May isn’t opinionated and prepared to give his own views on the subject at hand.
I was curious as to how governments deal with the problems that chaos theory creates when trying to make policy decisions. How do politicians cope with the challenges of predicting or manipulating the future, given that we can have only partial knowledge of the systems being analyzed?
“I think that’s rather a flattering account of what goes on here,” he said. “With some notable exceptions it’s mostly a bunch of very egotistical people, very ambitious people, who are primarily interested in their own careers.”
“Not believing in climate change because you can’t trust weather reports is a bit like saying that because you can’t tell when the next wave is going to break on Bondi beach you don’t believe in tides.”
May has recently been applying his models of the spread of infectious diseases and the dynamics of ecological food webs to understanding the banking crisis of 2008. Working with Andrew Haldane at the Bank of England, he has been considering the financial network as if it were an ecosystem. Their research has revealed how financial instruments intended to optimize returns with seemingly minimal risk can cause instability in the system as a whole.
May believes that the problem isn’t necessarily the mechanics of the market itself. It’s the way small things in the market are amplified and perverted by how humans interact with them. For him, the most worrying thing about the banking mess is getting a better handle on this contagious spreading of worry.
“The challenge is: How do you put human behavior into the model? I don’t think human psychology is mathematizable. Here we are throwing dice with our future. But if you’re trying to predict the throw of the dice, then you want to know the circumstance of who owns the dice.”
That was something I hadn’t taken into account. Perhaps I should factor in who sold me the casino die in the first place.
“I think many of the major problems facing society are outside the realm of science and mathematics,” he said. “It’s the behavioral sciences that are the ones we are going to have to depend on to save us.”
The idea that invisible atoms might be bashing around in such a way as to impact the visible world had first been suggested by the Roman poet Lucretius in his didactic poem On the Nature of Things:
Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways . . . their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight. . . . It originates with the atoms which move of themselves. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses, so that those bodies are in motion that we see in sunbeams, moved by blows that remain invisible.
This was written in 60 BC, but it would take Einstein’s mathematical analysis of the motion to confirm this atomic explanation of the random movement in Lucretius’s sunbeams and Brown’s pollen. Nowadays we call it Brownian motion.
Hawking has certainly expressed such a view: “I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.”
respecting truth: willful ignorance in the internet age
lee mcintyre 2015
ignorance: everything you need to know about not knowing
robert graef 2017
i ching: the book of change
thomas cleary 2017
nonsense: the power of not knowing
jamie holmes 2015
blind spot: why we fail to see the solution right in front of us
gordon rugg 2013
de docta ignorantia (on learned ignorance)
nicholas of cusa 1440
agnotology: the making and unmaking of ignorance
robert proctor, londa schiebinger 2008
institutes of metaphysic
james frederick ferrier 1854
nicholas of cusa on learned ignorance: a translation and an appraisal of de docta ignorantia
jasper hopkins 1990
transformative experience
laurie paul 2014
subliminal: how your unconscious mind rules your behavior
leonard mlodinow 2012
understanding ignorance: the surprising impact of what we don’t know
daniel denicola 2017
The demand for negative proof frequently issues from one who is committed to a belief as irrefutable, immune from evidence. It is a demand that is meant to close dialogue; it is not expected to be met; and, unless there is a specifiable, finite database to draw on, it never will be met.
ignorance as an under-identified social problem
sheldon ungar 2008
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00195.x
the virtues of ignorance: complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge
bill vitek and wes jackson 2010
is justified true belief knowledge?
edmund gettier 1963
analysis 23, no. 6: 121–123
In 1963, this game was shockingly disrupted by a tidy, three-page article. It is Edmund Gettier III’s one and only publication.1 He simply presented cases in which even justified true belief was not sufficient for knowing something “in the strong sense,” that is, for genuine knowledge. How could that be?
Imagine, for example, that Jim believes the Red Sox beat the Yankees today by a score of 4 to 3, and in fact they did; Jim learned this by watching the game on TV. Thus Jim’s belief is in fact true and he has reasonable justification for his belief. Here is the problem: unbeknownst to Jim, what he watched was a rebroadcast of yesterday’s game—in which it also happened that the Red Sox beat the Yankees by the same score. So, Jim does not really know who won today’s game, not in the “strong sense.”
In Gettier’s problematic situations, there is a mere coincidence between one’s epistemic judgment and the facts: we do not really possess the knowledge we think we do. In Jim’s case, unknown unknowns were in play; his justified true belief was a matter of epistemic luck. Typically, Gettier cases postulate both one’s ignorance of relevant factors and one’s luck in meeting the justified, true belief conditions notwithstanding that ignorance. How can we exclude such circumstances? Unfortunately, Gettier did not develop a solution; he just let loose the force of his examples.
epistemic luck
duncan pritchard 2005
Nonetheless, in common human experience, luck is indeed a factor in our coming to know, and our ignorance is also often a matter of luck. Duncan Pritchard, drawing on the work of Peter Unger, has identified three types of “benign” epistemic luck and has proposed a fourth. (1) There is content epistemic luck: it is lucky that the proposition is true, that the Red Sox won, in my example. (2) Second, there is capacity epistemic luck: it is lucky that Jim is capable of knowing the outcome of the game. (3) There is evidential epistemic luck: it is lucky that Jim happened to see the game on TV. This condition presumably describes cases like those discussed earlier (chapter 9) in which some historical traces have survived by luck, despite the loss of others. (4) Pritchard also teases out doxastic epistemic luck, in which it is lucky that the believer believes the proposition: it is lucky that Tim believes the Red Sox won. These are, Pritchard asserts, unproblematic for genuine knowledge. But another type is of concern: (5) veritic epistemic luck, in which it is a matter of luck that the belief is true.3 Veritic luck is at play in Gettier-type cases, and Pritchard thinks it is fatal to genuine knowledge and must be eliminated. While it seems clear that Gettier-type cases do involve veritic luck—it was a matter of luck that Jim’s belief about who won the game was true—we might also analyze the case as a matter of (bad) evidential luck: perhaps it was unlucky that Jim didn’t happen to watch the screen when the notice appeared that it was a rebroadcast.
( Pritchard also identifies a fifth type of epistemic luck as problematic: (5) reflective epistemic luck, in which, “given what the agent is able to know by reflection alone, it is a matter of luck that her belief is true” (Epistemic Luck, 175). This type is directed toward internalist accounts of knowledge—accounts that take the justification of beliefs to be solely a matter of the believer’s internal, cognitive states. )
Inspofar as human knowledge is a social construct in this profound sense, so is ignorance. This means that our new knowledge creates our ignorance: it does not simply identify unknowns that were lurking among the unknown unknowns all along; as we grasp for them, we formulate them, and thus we create their manifestation.
the early works of john dewey, 1882–1898, vol. 2: 1887, psychology
jo ann boydston 1975
ignorance: how it drives science
stuart firestein 2012
epistemology the study of how we know, study of knowledge
study of ignorance, which has no name.
agnotology the study of how we do not know, study of manufacture of ignorance, for example tobacco, sugar, nuclear, genetically modified, terrorism and anti terrorism.
agniology is study of what cannot be known, ferrier and taleb
no name for tao, that which cannot be known but can be done.