In February of 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush, was taking questions at a Pentagon briefing. In response to a question around the lack of direct evidence supporting the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Rumsfeld gave this answer (in part):
“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 tend to be the difficult ones.” (Wikipedia)
Rumsfeld was highly ridiculed for this “unknown unknowns” comment, mostly in popular media, but the man was on to something. The graph that accompanies this article, of the Dunning Kruger effect, was sent to me by my beautiful and talented niece who is in graduate school for Plant Pathology (and who clearly takes after her Aunt Sherri). She sent me this graph following a vigorous text discussion around the frustrations of grad school in the natural sciences. You started in an undergrad environment, in which you are taught sound theory after sound theory and then go into a laboratory to conduct well-designed experiments that are supposed to be neatly completed in an afternoon or two. Everything is fact. Everything happens as expected (eventually). And you began to think you knew how the world worked (as you annoyingly explained to your non-scientist friends). Then you got to grad school. And facts were not so cut and dried anymore. There was nuance and boundary conditions. Theorems like Newtonian physics explained everything until they didn’t and it was only by recognizing that there were facts that did not fit the existing theory that other theorems like Quantum Mechanics were developed. And then there was “real” research, when you explored hypothesis after hypothesis that your experiments could not confirm. It was a lonely dark tunnel of seemingly dead ends. But you kept searching for truth. And eventually, you found some. What an incredibly important lesson to learn—because that is how life works.
I saw the Dunning Kruger effect play out over and over during my career as I coached young scientists. The confidence they had! OK, many times it was arrogance. But they all learned, one by one, that they didn’t know as much as they thought they knew. The best of them began with that sense of humility already; the most successful developed it. Humility gives you not just a respect for what you can learn from others but a hunger to do it. Enlightening someone to the fact that there is much they don’t know that they don’t know is one of the trickiest human interactions to navigate! It wasn’t that hard when I was coaching those who were looking to me for insights already, but it was damn hard when I was trying to gently enlighten peers or superiors. There is a very fine line you have to walk between embarrassing someone and convincing them. And that line moves around as a function of their hard headedness and defensiveness. I should know. I’ve had to have my head knocked quite a few times! Sometimes you just need to give someone grace because they have zero desire to be enlightened or you know they will come to it in their own time. Sometimes you have to push forward because if you don’t there is the potential that bad things will happen sooner or later. Regardless, don’t judge someone on their lack of knowledge. Focus more on their willingness to learn.
I have mentioned before my love for non-fiction and how during my working years I kept collecting books, looking forward to retirement when I could finally READ to my heart’s content! At first, it was wonderful! I could read a little something, have a few questions, and then go down rabbit holes as much as I wanted to fill in my knowledge. Very quickly, though, I learned that trying to be a Renaissance Woman in the 21st Century is a losing proposition. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know which made me want to learn more. It doesn’t help that I get a daily email from Book Bub with discounted ebooks—I want every one of those histories and biographies! Yes, it’s a virtuous cycle, but it’s also a little vicious. I have gotten overwhelmed by how much I realize now that I didn’t know I didn’t know.
So, here is a look into my reading life. Besides a shelf full of books like Biomimicry and The Sixth Extinction, a wish list with the likes of Sapiens and Value in Ethics and Economics, I am a faithful reader of The New Yorker and Longreads (which sponsors both longform journalistic efforts and curates a reading list). I gravitate to longform journalism because there is the effort to go more deeply into a subject, turning over rocks and going past the quick assumptions about a subject. Here is a sample of what I ingested just over the last week: Returning Britain’s agricultural processes back towards traditional farming with a detailed look at the knock on effects of different farming techniques on the natural balance; the growing trend of participative Underground Railroad Reenactments and their impact on people of all socio-economic backgrounds; a profile of author Yuval Noah Harari (which is why Sapiens is on my wish list); whether or not Jeanne Calment really was the oldest living person at 122 or a fraud, with a deeper dive into how these investigations look from the perspective of different stakeholders; a comparison of the 1930’s concerns about democracy’s survival to those of today, reminding us that when we talk about “worst I’ve ever seen” it’s still only a “time drop” in the bucket of history; diamond mining in Botswana which gave a fascinating history of not just the industry and some key players but a nice primer on Big Diamonds of History; the search for a woman missing in British Columbia for seven years; and, how the CIA secretly sold encryption services to gullible governments around the world. I learned something fascinating (and previously unknown to me) in each of these articles! Each one has broadened my perspective on something I didn’t realize I needed some broadening on. And they all make me hungry for more.
I promise I AM heading somewhere with this line of discussion and it’s to emphasize this point: you cannot know everything, but you can stay aware that there is always something more about a topic or a situation that you don’t know. Look for more perspective. Remember that there is more to “truth” than your personal life experience. As a scientist, I’ve been taught to almost never think in absolutes. Situations are never as simple as they seem (or as simple as we want them to be) and it is critical to always want more information. The Longreads articles, in particular, give me glimpses into lives so different from my own that I continually marvel at my good fortune for the life I was born into. I’ve always had a lot to say on assumptions, and I’m guessing I always will. I am humbled every day with new examples of incorrect assumptions I make about someone’s life or situation or background or knowledge. There is so much I don’t know that I don’t know—only now, instead of scaring or frustrating me, it inspires and motivates me. I hope it can be that way for you, too.
[Editor’s Note: I read pulpy fiction novels and happily remain wedded to my simple beliefs. Sigh. Trish]