Not Just Bliss: the Case for Ignorance
Not Just Bliss: the Case for Ignorance
When is ignorance is more liberating than limiting?
To each his suff'rings: all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan,
The tender for another's pain;
Th' unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
THOMAS GRAY, 1742 - origin of the phrase “Ignorance is bliss.”
Known, Unknown
“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
If you're Donald Rumsfeld, this statement is helpful for sending your country into an unwitting war. If you’re me, it’s useful for much, much more. I believe ignorance isn't only a weapon to be used in political battles, arguments, or to manipulate and control populations. Ignorance is a powerful tool, and it canbe wielded for good.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb posited in his black swan theory that individual events like the Hindenburg or the Great Depression are unpredictable and unknowable individually, but very likely in aggregate. In other words, something is going to happen- even if you don't know what it is. This theory relies on mathematical modeling and logical reasoning to better guard economies against existential threat from the unknown quadrant of the Johari Window.
Taleb’s theory is a compelling argument for embracing our own ignorance and finding its dimensions. According to the four stages of competence, Ignorance is a natural part of the process of learning and improvement. Intuition sandwiches awareness, and intuition is a potential candidate for the 4th quadrant left hanging by Rumsfeld: the unknown known. First, we’re ignorant of how much we suck, and then, we’re ignorant of how much we rock.
Intuition is a form of applied ignorance that relegates reasoning to the subconscious. However, ignorance doesn’t just have to be a set of blinders. I’d like to go further and suggest that ignorance is often a liberating factor, rather than a limiting one.
In learning, we often use ignorance to our advantage such as our tendency to lie-to-children by abstracting concepts into simple falsities sit regent in the throne of true understanding until it comes of age. You might also be familiar with this idea as “Wittgenstein's ladder”:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
Depending on the level of uncertainty of information, it may be beneficial to ignore certain shaky pieces of knowledge, especially in probabilistic modelling, where considering untrustworthy information can lead to worse results than just ignoring it.
In group decision making and bargaining, information can often be misinterpreted egocentrically by opposed sides to lead to opposite conclusions. In the case of legal settlement, some studies have found that increased information can lead to longer times to resolution if that information is open to multiple interpretations.
But most of all, ignorance sets us free from the limitations of what’s possible. Let’s talk about Good Will Hunting.
Just kidding, let’s talk about the incredible real human being who is the inspiration for the famous “unsolved equation on the chalkboard” scene in GWH. George Dantzig:
An event in Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous story in 1939, while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.
Multiple studies and common sense tell us that expectations influence outcomes. Without the expectation of unsolvability, Dantzig was willing to tackle these infamous problems because he was ignorant of the fact that he shouldn’t be able to tackle these infamous problems. Perhaps Neil Gaiman put it best:
If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.
When you start out...you have no idea what you're doing. This is great. People who know what they're doing know the rules, and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible...were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do. And because nobody has done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again.
Orks from 40k work a lot like George Dantzig and Neil Gaiman in that their collective ignorance cowers in the face of their awesome belief :
[Orks] have a sort of collaborative, collective psychic ability, meaning that if enough Orks believe something is true, then it will actually become so, brought into being in realspace through the power of the Immaterium by their gestalt psychic ability.
They believe red makes cars faster, so if they paint a car red, it goes faster.
Humans are actually a lot like Orks. Why? We channel our ignorance and belief in similar ways to accomplish feats of ludicrous scale and ingenuity. Sometimes, it burns us and the cities in which we reside. Other, luckier instances lead to incredible feats like The Bomb and The Bombe. I guess some cities got burnt because of both of those too. Hm. Humans really suck don’t we? All our ignorance and all our belief amount to two sides of the same coin: abstraction.
Abstraction
Abstraction is the simplest form of applied ignorance. When we abstract information, we remove context from specific cases in our memory in order to create a generalized model. This is a willful loss of information, and it isn’t a simple thing to do; research suggests it requires a novel wiring of brain systems to achieve such a feet.
Human society stoked the primal flame of ignorance. Our ability to accept the unknown was a promethean revelation that allowed us to form societies bigger than any other species on the planet. Case in point: how we tolerate outsiders and strangers.
Strangers
As much as you might find humans hateful, intolerant, and ignorant, we’re actually unique in the animal kingdom for our ability to not kill outsiders on sight. In “The Human Swarm” Mark Moffett details how the societies of ants, chimps, mole-rats, bees, pretty much every animal society save our own, is murder-happy towards strangers.1
This tolerance of the unfamiliar, the unknown, represents an applied ignorance that allows the machine of human mega-society to flourish. If we refused to work with anyone save those we knew, we’d have stopped at villages and never made it all the way to empires.
How was ancient Egypt able to progress so far? That’s easy:
Denial
If we go back to the Rumsfeld quote from the beginning, we could think of denial as another candidate for the mythical 4th quadrant: The Unknown Known.
Ignorance is bliss for children who don't know how much a trip to Disneyland costs. Parents know they'll return home to a massive credit card bill, and this detracts from their enjoyment in the moment. So they ignore, they offer their card without looking at the bill. The children can blissfully carry their memories back to their friends and classmates regardless, but many of the adults make the difficult decision to deny thriftiness in the name of family time.
In a world in which every issue screams it is the most pressing and most important, being able to shut out the screaming is a skill. For those of us in the position of the parents, denial is the small death of truth that allows us to live our lives, to soldier on, to put off acceptance until we are ready for it to swallow us whole, which is often never.
If adults went around absorbing the full emotional weight of everything happening in society, the death, the disease, the mismanagement, the inequity, they would overload. If you’re anything like me, sometimes you probably do. I often feel despondent at the state of the world, but I also know that having a breakdown about it isn’t going to help anyone.
I’m not saying it’s good that we must ignore the glaring issues in the world in order to live our lives; I’m saying it’s necessary.
Trauma Splitting
There’s an increasingly studied phenomena that when we undergo traumatic events as children, we will sometimes create new personas to help us deal with the experience. If you watched Moon Knight, you’re probably already more familiar with the concept than you’d prefer.
Information gained by one persona isn’t necessarily available to the rest of a trauma survivor’s mind. Moon Knight is of course a work of fiction, but it tells a story about how humans use ignorance to protect themselves from pain, how we steel ourselves with denial to keep going through pain that would otherwise make us unable to perform.
Trauma splitting is the most intense example we have of applied ignorance- and it’s an instinctual one. Ignorance is in our nature, and it is our job not to struggle with it, but to channel it.
Koan
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Zen Buddhism gets it. It teaches adherents to accept that there is knowledge that is unattainable, reason that is paradoxical, and information that serves only to confuse.
Koans are a style of riddle that are used to illustrate the futility of a quest for total understanding. They are riddles that mirror real life’s lack of certainty. Much of Buddhism focuses on presence of mind and desertion from worldly desire and concern, which I see as an applied ignorance- don’t focus on what you know, focus on what you are.
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
Here’s a koan about the paradoxical nature of existence. How can we enjoy being with the gaping void of nonexistence threatening us to either side? Simple: We ignore it, and focus on what’s immediately in front of us, enjoy the time we have.
The next Koan is similar in theme to the first, but has such a oh shit… vibe to it that I wanted to share:
During the civil wars in feudal Japan, an invading army would quickly sweep into a town and take control. In one particular village, everyone fled just before the army arrived - everyone except the Zen master. Curious about this old fellow, the general went to the temple to see for himself what kind of man this master was. When he wasn't treated with the deference and submissiveness to which he was accustomed, the general burst into anger. "You fool," he shouted as he reached for his sword, "don't you realize you are standing before a man who could run you through without blinking an eye!" But despite the threat, the master seemed unmoved. "And do you realize," the master replied calmly, "that you are standing before a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?"
Who said buddhism couldn’t be badass?
Conclusions
This has been a rapid fire overview of some of the ways in which we use ignorance for the better. As you go about your day to day life, try to take notice of times where not knowing the truth was more useful than the truth itself.
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Whales do some cool stuff in tolerating individuals from other pods during large grouping events, but nothing so insane as being able to tolerate an individual no one in the pod recognizes.
I enjoyed this; had definitely never considered abstraction as instrumentalized ignorance, but, yeah it is. What is the area of this rectangle? I am happy to remain ignorant of what color it is or what it's made of; only the length of its sides matter
Just found you and joined because of this. This is great and I’m looking forward to reading your work. All the wretchedness and all the infinite possibilities of hope lie in the unknown unknowns quadrant and this concept of ignorance is the only vehicle that will allow us to explore it!