As Lewis Hyde wrote in Trickster Makes This World: The agile mind is pleased to find what it was not looking for.
I was definitely not looking for the concept of existential stupidity.
I was innocently reading an article from npr and clicked on a link that took me to a 2008 essay in the Journal of Cell Science (because of course it did), where a cell biologist made my day and probably my week and possibly even my year.
Martin A. Schwartz, who was somewhere else at the time, but is now at Yale Medical School (I looked him up on LinkedIn and sent him a note to thank him for his essay), absolutely nails an aspect of reality almost all of us get wrong all the time. Because of his area of interest and experience, and the nature of the journal he was writing for, he titled the essay The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research. But it could as easily have been titled The Importance of Stupidity in Life.
Pay Attention: Life Lesson Ahead
Schwartz says:
The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.
If your ignorance in an area you have extensive knowledge of is infinite, consider the state of your ignorance in areas you know little to nothing about—or don’t even know exist.
Science involves confronting our “absolute stupidity.” That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.
Well this has all kinds of implications for decision-making, learning, and creating transformational change, among other things. And it supports my assertion that we ought to be coming from what I call experiment mindset rather than production mindset.
Running an experiment is based on the assumption that you don’t have all the information…that you will get more information as a result of the experiment. When you’re trying to produce a specific result, on the other hand, you are operating under the assumption that you have all the relevant information and you can guarantee that if you take these specific steps you can get that precise outcome.
The World Is Not All That Knowable
I keep the chapter on the illusion of understanding in Daniel Kanheman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow bookmarked with an index card on which I’ve written a quote from page 201:
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
But the rest of the paragraph, which comes before this sentence, is more relevant here:
You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle.
The less we know then, the easier it is to feel smart about something. As we begin to learn more, we recognize—on a good day, anyway—how little we actually do know. If we’re allergic to uncertainty and feeling stupid, however, we focus more attention on avoiding those feelings than we do on gathering additional information and rethinking our point of view.
The bottom line is that confusion (aka stupidity) can often be a good thing. In fact, we ought to be a lot more confused than we are, and if we don’t feel confused, we should wonder why. This might be a good time to reread David DiSalvo’s What Makes Your Brain Happy, and Why You Should Do the Opposite.
Note: My favorite thing about the word stupid is that if you proceed down the list of definitions, you come to troublesome. And snap! Another piece of the framework comes together.