The Pursuit of Ignorance

As any business is aware, the more you know, and the more your employees know the better resource you can be to your clients and your fellow employees. In a 2013 TED TALK, a Neuroscientist at Columbia University, Stuart Firestein, praised the pursuit of ignorance. This probably goes against everything you were taught at school. Most likely all of you have spent a great deal of your life in the pursuit of knowledge. Always trying to know more.

In his TED TALK, Dr. Firestein turned this on its head very succinctly by explaining that what it is we don’t know is much more exhilarating and interesting than what we do know. Talking about what we do know leads nowhere. Talking about what we don’t know leads everywhere. Marie Curie once said, “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” Once we know something, its often not really very interesting to us any longer. It’s what we don’t know that sparks our interest.

Knowing what you don’t know. James Clerk Maxwell, physicist called this “thoroughly conscious ignorance.” Being aware of how much you don’t know. Dr. Firestein referred to this as recognizing and studying communal gaps in knowledge. Every profession has its own communal gap in knowledge, or things that everyone acknowledges they don’t know.

Not only does every profession have communal knowledge gaps, but frequently, companies, departments, and individuals within them have knowledge gaps. Things they don’t know, that, if they did, would make them better employees.

We too often focus exclusively on quantifying what our employees know. Of course, it’s important to recognize this, but what we regularly miss is seeing whether our employees have a desire or a curiosity to know more. When an employee asks a question, too frequently we take this as ignorance, when in fact it should be a seen as a desire to learn. We should be encouraging a questioning spirit rather than suppressing it.

Knowledge is a big subject – but ignorance is a bigger one. In a toast he gave at a dinner celebrating the work of Einstein, George Bernard Shaw said, “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” A few hundred years before Shaw, Immanuel Kant, German philosopher saw the same paradigm and called it “The Principle of Question Propagation”. Again, the more you know, the more questions you’ll have.

In his TED talk, Dr. Firestein posited that there are two types of ignorance: Low-quality ignorance and high-quality ignorance. High-quality ignorance is created by knowledge, while low-quality ignorance is created by, well, ignorance. Again, we should be supporting our employees who exhibit high quality ignorance and reevaluating those who choose to embrace low quality ignorance, demonstrated by a lack of inquisitiveness and a contentment with their current education and expertise.

The more you know, the more questions you can ask. THIS translates to knowing a lot of stuff leads to asking a lot of questions, A lot of smart questions.

Dr. Firestein also said, “you get a little knowledge so you can better define the ignorance you have to go after.” This is directly applicable to our businesses. Simply knowing that we don’t know stuff is a dead end. However, being able to define what it is we need to know is what, conversely, makes knowledge so important. The fact that more knowledge creates more ignorance is something we probably shouldn’t dwell on too much. It’s sort of like the paradox of time travel: Thinking about what it means will just give you a headache.

So, instead of reveling in what we know, we should be celebrating what we don’t know, and the fact that we know enough to achieve a “thoroughly conscious ignorance”, which in turn allows us to seek out the knowledge we’ve identified that we’re lacking.

Our professionals at ASN are constantly striving to fill those gaps in our communal knowledge, which enables us to serve you better. In a world that is changing as quickly and radically as it is today, you need a partner that will never be content with what they know. ASN is that partner. Our promise to you is that we will continually seek out the knowledge needed to provide you with the best service possible. You can count on it.