Atomic Nerds

Recently, we upgraded the blogging software to the latest version of WordPress. It contains some improvements, but for some reason we can no longer find incoming links. For that reason, I was entirely unaware that the E3 Gazette (now arriving at a blogroll near you) had linked my post on labeling and expanded upon it. It’s a rather neat encapsulation of how knowing what you don’t know is as important as knowing what you do, and how incompetence, lack of experience, or basic stupidity will rob you of this essential ingredient, but what really interested me was in the comments, when Doug Loss brought up the idea of Unknown Knowns, which he describes as “things you don’t realize you know”, much in the same way that fish have no word for water.

I think this is an important idea for several reasons. The first is that when you live in a culture- or subculture- you’ll absorb all kinds of tidbits and trivia without really realizing it. People who are good at this tend to be excellent at things like Trivial Pursuit, geekery within specific fields- like music or sports- and tend to go through life completely unaware of the degree to which their collection of trivia is not generally shared. I should know, I’m one of them. As with many natural information-packrat geeks, it was a rather crucial social revelation to me to figure out that people would stop wanting to beat me with sticks if I stopped assuming that everyone knew exactly what I meant when I made an offhand reference to Walter Mondale. It’s not consciously researched knowledge, it’s the sorts of odds and ends you pick up when researching something else, or even just small details picked up through a love of fiction- which will, if any good, always contain bits and pieces of it. Terry Pratchett calls is “white knowledge”, and describes it as the process by which people arrive at a general mental picture of elves without ever having picked up Tolkien, much less Celtic or Norse mythology. In this form, it’s mostly harmless- it serves almost as a de facto secret handshake for people in a certain culture, subculture, or hobby.

Another form of unknown knowns involves the sorts of things we accept as basic reality as a member of a particular culture; they are small details of our daily lives, or things we never experience in any other way, or shared cultural agreements that make up the experience of life as a member of that culture. Forget regional music or national costume, these are the sorts of things that really make up the experience, and they are the things most noticed by travelers, because they are completely ordinary to that culture but radical alterations to reality for the traveler. Some years ago I ran across an attempt to document some of these small but important details and assumptions for Americans, in a response to someone’s earnest assertion that America has no culture; it can be found here. It spawned a great many similar lists by residents of other countries or unique regions, and reading through all of them that still lead to a live link was a very eye-opening experience for me. Some of the things I knew because I love to read travel narratives, but most of them were news to me because they simply were outside some bit of cultural certainty I had never questioned or been aware of. People who speak with scorn of the ignorance and lack of world knowledge of Americans are talking about this kind of knowledge, although they usually go on within a sentence or two to reveal that they are similarly afflicted. On an online forum I inhabited long ago, shortly after 9/11 I had an extensive argument with another forum member- a very bright, driven woman, whom prior to 9/11 I had quite admired- who insisted that all the causes of the event were political ones. I pointed out that the architects of 9/11 had made an explicit radical religious case for their actions, which would not be altered an iota if America altered its foreign policy. She insisted this was merely talk to appease the ignorant upon whom they depended. No matter how many quotes, translations, and speeches I gathered, she could not be swayed: the causes were political. She worked with the UN and was not religious herself, and it was simply outside all possible frame of reference for her that someone could put religion above politics to such an extent that it became a greater basis for their attitudes and opinions, let alone that they could put almost all stock in religion and none in politics. (She had a similar complete failure of understanding of deeply religious members of her own culture, whom she regarded as deliberately deceptive about their true political motives.)

The most dangerous form of unknown “known”, is the kind that people think they know but is actually an assumption that has merely always worked so far. Because they do not even know the assumption is there- it’s part of their mental foundation of reality itself- people are therefore unable to question it at all, and these can lead to catastrophic conclusions. At their most harmless, they merely hinder progress; many great scientific advances have been made when this sort of assumption was revealed for what it was, and someone was alert enough to notice it and begin to question. Similarly, many tremendous military victories or defeats occurred because someone either questioned an assumption that was thought to be part of the simple reality of combat, or someone ran into a culture or new tactical reality in which their assumption was totally invalid. These are the kind of unknown knowns that get people or cultures killed.

Widespread- and varied- study is the only thing that can give anybody even a fighting chance at uncovering some of their own unknown knowns. Even then, it’s usually as difficult and painful as trying to kiss your own elbow; how can you recognize a faulty strut in your understanding of reality when you’re currently using it to understand reality?

Posted omphaloskepsis, the internet is serious business |