The Unknown Unknowns: A Passage from an Article by Errol Morris
The following is part of an article by Errol Morris, which appeared in the New York Times, with the title “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is” on June 20, 2010.
Here he is having an exchange with David Dunning, who is identified as a Cornell professor of social psychology.
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DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.
ERROL MORRIS: Knowing what you don’t know? Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?
DAVID DUNNING: That’s absolutely right. It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. [4] Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”
…
And yet there was something in Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns that had captured Dunning’s imagination. I wanted to know more, and so I e-mailed him: why are you so obsessed with Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns?” Here is his answer:
The notion of unknown unknowns really does resonate with me, and perhaps the idea would resonate with other people if they knew that it originally came from the world of design and engineering rather than Rumsfeld.
If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.
To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem. Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.” These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.
Unknown unknowns also exist at the level of solutions. People often come up with answers to problems that are o.k., but are not the best solutions. The reason they don’t come up with those solutions is that they are simply not aware of them. Stefan Fatsis, in his book “Word Freak,” talks about this when comparing everyday Scrabble players to professional ones. As he says: “In a way, the living-room player is lucky . . . He has no idea how miserably he fails with almost every turn, how many possible words or optimal plays slip by unnoticed. The idea of Scrabble greatness doesn’t exist for him.” (p. 128)
Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible. This is one of the reasons I often urge my student advisees to find out who the smart professors are, and to get themselves in front of those professors so they can see what smart looks like.
So, yes, the idea resonates. I would write more, and there’s probably a lot more to write about, but I haven’t a clue what that all is.
July 21st, 2010 at 9:36 pm
The true believer in the real God, the living Creator God, knows he doesn’t know, and never will in this life and that is much of what prayer for guidance is all about ( and belief in the leading of the Spirit)
I learned this the hard way thinking I could KNOW and plan and carry out the plan -even after I became a Believer and I would be aghast at the defeat I would experience and then notice as something better took place. Over time and numerous experiences I finally woke up to the reality
that the better things are done by God; we do the screwed up things.
In the wilderness travels during the Exodus Moses provided water for the people at the instructions of God by speaking to a ‘rock’ and water came forth.
After numerous such experiences Moses took it upon himself to strike the rock to bring the water. HE WANTED TO INTERJECT ‘HIMSELF’ into the program and he was denied entering into The Promised Land.
A great lesson here and it appears quite a few poor ‘educated’ souls
will NEVER know.
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:20 am
Fatuous perfectionism and meritocratic sword-polishing.
The social Darwinist ideal is that our conceptual betters displace us. Does this professor now despair that the displacement does not happen quickly enough?
There’s a more interesting direction to take this (which I thought the professor would) — people tend to do that which they have no conception of and fail to do what others know. And much of the time that’s because they are not told. In other words, competition is 99 44/100% about denying knowledge, not demonstrating best practice.
That a “social psychologist” failed to see this socio-pathology as the interesting (and “actionable”) component just goes to show how stultifying the university has become.
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:28 am
Our passage throughout the life experience is similar to the journey through a complex arrangement of passageways, as seen in a labyrinth: complex, torturous, and intricate, but once accomplished, the unknown intricacies of the other unknown paths are irrelevant. We do not know how gravity works, but in this world that is an unknown of no consequence: the consequences of our known actions, are all that matters to a mortal being!
July 22nd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
These epistemological questions are as old as Aristotle, who took Western thinking in the wrong direction by splitting up the unity of humans into mind/body/spirit, an error which was compounded by the Cartesians and is still enshrined in our thinking. For example, even people who never ‘learned’ to swim, know how to swim if thrown into water. All mammals can swim. They just didn’t know they knew it, and if it didn’t exist in the mind for them it couldn’t exist at all.
The better answer lies in Buddhism which asserts that we all live in a state of Delusion about what constitutes reality and it is better to encounter the world with what is called ‘beginner mind.’ That way one is never surprised by the unknown, the unknowable or the known for that matter. If the world is new at every instant, such notions are useless. Follow the path of wu wei (undirected action) and you cannot fail regardless of what is known or unknown by the self deluded consciousness,
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:34 pm
An example of what comes to my mind here is the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel interior walkway collapse in 1981 (built in 1978). I happened to know a building official (some years later) who had been on the K.C. building codes staff at the time of that disaster. As mentioned above, this example is in the realm of engineering. From what my acquaintance related to me, apparently the load standards for the elevated walkway were adequate for the intended and expected utilization of the walkway, that is, for crowds of people “walking’ upon it.
But on July 17, 1981, a dance event was held there, and the vibration (plus weight) of the dancing crowds placed a different set of stresses on the structure, and it collapsed. So, thereafter, national building codes were modified to enable such structures to take such wavy stresses.
“Who coulda known?’ in hindsight.
BTW, the building inspector, who migrated to another jurisdiction where I met him, was about as strict an official as I’ve ever seen in government. When I occasionally got complaints about his rigidity (his enforcement policies, not his personality, which was quite profesional, even quiet and patient), I had no problem explaining why.
I think that one lesson here is that it is imperative to continually seek out contrary opinions so as to at least give us a fighting chance to notice or anticipate the unexpected that another mind might see coming down the pike.
In the case of Rumsfeld, at the time, I, too identified his statement as evidence of intellectual humility as did Dunning. Too bad the war in the first place was based so wholly on falsehoods.
History can give us clues, also, and that is why it’s so sad that history is so deemphasized today. It’s not only that spinmeisters can portray any damn thing as history (hey, just tune in cable tv shows), but that we could avoid so many stupid, costly mistakes if we’d only inquire into the past….
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
You post many excellent comments, Jim Z. But I especially appreciate this one.
July 23rd, 2010 at 10:19 am
Jim Z wrote:
“I think that one lesson here is that it is imperative to continually seek out contrary opinions so as to at least give us a fighting chance to notice or anticipate the unexpected that another mind might see coming down the pike.”
That was in the context of relating an engineering disaster: the KC hotel collapse.
That reminded me of a book chapter I perused a couple of weeks ago: a fascinating account of the emergency exits engineering of the WTC towers in NYC and some of the things that went wrong on Sept 11, 2001. Two items particularly stuck in my memory:
(1) The engineers did a sophisticated “traffic flow” simulation of people exiting via the stairwells. But they did not take psychology into account: people “giving up” and sitting down on landings or trying to exit the stairwells into lower floors of the building, thereby blocking other people trying to exit.
(2) The width of the stairs was engineered to allow two people travelling side-by-side going down the stairs. The design was made in the 1960′s, and by 2001 the average American was quite a bit fatter than in 1960, so it was not in general true in 2001 two people could descend the WTC stairs side-by-side.
Several other items of a similar nature were in the book chapter, but I don’t remember specifics.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1960′s I heard frequent references to the “school of hard knocks”. IMO the building inspector Jim Z mentioned is an alumnus.
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
I think that one lesson here is that it is imperative to continually seek out contrary opinions so as to at least give us a fighting chance . . .”Jim Z
This is in my mind a very important practice in testing pne’s own ideas about many things (while holding firmly those ideas one feels tested and true) but always being open to new light.
In reading some types of history and writings of men in other times we can see that their ideas of fundamental things were often obviously shaped by the times in which they lived. So . . a reality check follows. Were they more right and their times more in harmony with what is best in the potentials of human culture . . or have WE progressed where we find a difference ?
We may draw differend conclusions from our neighbor but it is a worthwhile thought process.