IGNORANCE

WE KNOW LESS THEN WE THINK

Surveyed some of the most critical problems and developments of the present era, from the overhyped threat of terrorism to the underappreciated risk of technological disruption. If you are left with the nagging feeling that this is too much and that you cannot process it all, you are right. No person can.

Ignorance is lack of knowledge and information. The word "ignorant" is an objective that describes a person in the state of being unaware, or even cognitive dissonance and other cognitive relation and can describe individuals who deliberately ignore or disregard essential facts, or individuals who are ignorant of relevant facts. Ignorance can appear in three different types: factual ignorance, object ignorance and technical ignorance.

Ignorance can have adverse effects on individuals and societies, but can also benefit them by creating within them the desire to know more. For example, ignorance within science opens the opportunity to seek knowledge and make discoveries by asking new questions. Through this can only take place if the individual processes a curious mind.

In the last few centuries, liberal thought developed immense trust in the rational individual. It depicted individual humans as independent, intelligent agents and has made these mythical creatures the basis of modern society. Democracy is founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free-market capitalism believes that the customer is always right. Liberal education teaches students to think for themselves.

However, it is a mistake to put so much trust in the rational individual. Post-colonial and feminist thinkers have pointed out that this 'rational individual' may well be a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of upper-class white men. As noted earlier, behavioural economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.

Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Instead, we believe in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also makes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict, or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb, or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups. Firstly, different humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to make her clothes, how to start a fire, how to hunt rabbits, and how to escape lions. We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood the workings of an ordinary zip. Most people confidently replied that they understood them very well – after all, they use zips all the time. They were then asked to describe in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zip's operation. Most had no idea. 

This is not necessarily bad. Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in a futile effort to understand everything ourselves. From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others have worked exceptionally well for Homo sapiens. Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern era, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what's going on.

Consequently, some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are reinforced continuously and seldom challenged.