Unknown Unknowns

Errol Morris has a long feature in the NY Times about ignorance of ignorance. He calls this "anosognosia," a neurological term for a condition in which a patient seems unaware of his or her own illness. (For example, a woman paralyzed on her left side who would respond to a request to raise her left hand with vague evasions about being tired or constrained by her shirt.) Morris begins from the work of David Dunning, who is interested in how we might know if we are incompetent. After all, in many areas the skills we would use to evaluate our actions are the same skills we use to perform them. How would a bad doctor know that he is a bad doctor? How would a tone deaf man know that he can't sing?

I have not been particularly impressed by this piece, but I was interested to read that David Dunning and I had the same response to some famous words from Donald Rumsfeld:

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. 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.”

I never understood why Rumsfeld took abuse for saying this, because he was right. It can be a problem if you get so obsessed by your own ignorance that you can't act or make decisions, but obviously Rumsfeld never had that problem.

I believe that part of intelligence is constantly evaluating the state of our knowledge. My scientific heroes have all been keenly aware of the things they did not know, and all achieved success by focusing in on some small thing they could figure out. Newton disavowed any attempt to explain the causes of gravity. Darwin knew nothing about genetics, and he worried about it a great deal -- later editions of The Origin of Species included many more caveats about natural selection, because Darwin had been criticized for not being able to explain how a genetic trait can spread through a population and he knew the critics had a point.

In archaeology we have very little certain knowledge, and are always making guesses based on the evidence in the ground. Most interesting historical questions are the same way. To feel certain about many things is just foolish -- "doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one", as Voltaire put it.

And so, to get back to where I started, I don't think Dunning's insights are as powerful as he thinks they are. Yes, there are idiots who don't know it. But many people are keenly aware of their faults and weaknesses, and most smart people are even more aware of them. There are many more Gerald Fords and Jimmy Carters among us, paralyzed by doubt, than Sarah Palins and George W. Bushes.