There is a quote that is attributed to Harry Truman along the lines of, “give me a one-handed economist.” The quote references the frustrations that any key decision-maker might have when faced with challenging and sometimes conflicting information and choices. On the one hand is a decision with a predicted set of outcomes, but on the other hand is another decision or a separate undesirable set of consequences. The quote shows how challenging it is to understand and navigate the world when you have complex and nuanced understandings of what is happening.
Living in ignorance actually makes choices and decisions easier – there is no other hand of separate choices, of negative consequences, or different points of view. Ignoring our ignorance is preferable when we live our own narrative constructions, where what we see is all there is, and reality is what we make it to be.
Daniel Kahneman writes about this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, and how these narrative fallacies lead to so many of our predictable cognitive errors. He writes, “Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
When I think about Kahneman’s quote, I think about myself upon graduating with a Masters in Public Administration and Policy and my older sister upon her high school graduation. My sister has had strong political views for a very long time, views that she readily adopted as a high school student. Her self-assured profession of her political views which contrasted against the self-assured political views of my parents is part of what sparked an interest in me to study political science and public policy. I wanted to understand how people became so sure of political views that I didn’t fully understand, but which I could see contained multitudes of perspectives, benefits, and costs.
At the completion of my degree I felt that I had a strong understanding of the political processes in the United States. I could understand how public policy was shaped and formed, I could describe how people came to hold various points of view and why some people might favor different policies. But what I did not gain was a sense that one particular political approach was necessarily correct or inherently better than any other. So much of our political process is dependent on who stands to benefit, what is in our individual self-interest, and what our true goals happen to be. At the completion of a study of politics, I felt that I knew more than many, but I did not exactly feel that my political opinions were stronger than the political opinions of my sisters when she graduated high school. Her opinions were formed in ignorance (not saying this in a mean way!), and her limited perspective allowed her to be more confident in her opinions than I could be with my detailed and nuanced upstanding of political systems and processes.
Our views of the world and how we understand our reality is shaped by the information we absorb and the experiences we have. What you see is all there is, and the narrative you live within will make more sense when you are more ignorant of the complexities of the world around you. Your narrative will be simpler and more coherent since there won’t be other hands to contrast against your opinions, desires, and convictions.
Novel Learning 