The Age of Exponential Ignorance

Wait. If we’re producing new information at an exponential rate, then isn’t our ignorance also rising exponentially?

The thought stopped me dead in my tracks. Charlie was thoroughly confused.

As my friends, family, and coworkers know all too well, primarily because I talk about it a lot. Like, a lot. “Consuming books,” as I’ve taken to referring to one of the central tenets of my “personal resiliency plan,” centers around my new morning ritual that I’ve dubbed “walk ’n’ thinks.” That’s my pet term for my daily walks with my li’l pooch, Charlie, all over Richmond, Virginia, in the early mornings, listening to nonfiction books about how our brains work, having what I like to call “conversations with books.”

I know it sounds crazy. But look, we’re all figuring how to navigate this shit storm in one way or another, and immersing myself in nerdy, nonfiction, cognitive science books has given me some semblance of solace. FWIW, I’ve found it also pairs nicely with libations on the front porch, live music pumping out a Bluetooth speaker, and loved ones to discuss the stuff with…from a responsible distance away, of course.

I’ve been on a real kick lately, reading books about how we learn, experimentation, metacognition, ignorance, and my personal favorite, curiosity. I recognize that what I enjoy is not necessarily what other people enjoy, and that this might sound like a punishment or trigger post-collegiate traumatic flashbacks in some, but it’s helping me. Hopefully you’ve found your own healthy approach to personal resiliency.

After reading this mind-blowing article (paywall) in MIT Technology Review — my recent, impulsive subscription to which is a strong contender for #1 spot on my 2020 “things I never thought I would unironically ““buy it now” because I HAVE to read this article!!!…seriously, who am I?” list — I rushed to finish (finally) reading Mindset so I could dive into The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.

Spoiler: it’s sofa king good!
[I refuse to apologize for being a 46 year-old who uses that reference. It still makes me laugh.]

I laughed at myself, but was unabashedly proud, for listening to the book using the Audible app on my iPhone when I got to Chapter 7: Thinking With Technology during this morning’s walk ’n’ think. It was an especially trippy early morning (another 2020 habit that has me constantly invoking David Byrne’s existential question, “How did I get here?”) thanks to the layer of fog that enveloped the city.

The succession of “brain explosions” from the information felt like being in a recursive loop of the authors pressing a button that triggers earplugs made out of C4. It was a series of quake moments that felt like a series of underground nuclear tests along the New Madrid fault.

It totally blew my mind.

So this idea hit me — what if this dumpster fire of a year might actually herald the dawning of a new age? (I don’t hide my hippie biases, and really wish Altamont…among so many other factors, I know, but Altamont’s an easy scapegoat…hadn’t derailed the whole Age of Aquarius.) What if 2020 is remembered as the beginning of the Age of Ignorance? My dear friend Kes, also the most well-read person I’ve ever known, humbly suggested I modify the name to “the Age of Exponential Ignorance.” Kes is usually right, so imma go with that. Plus, it’s currently a Google nope, which I always love:

2020 has shattered our collective and individual illusions of explanatory depth.

The internet’s knowledge is so accessible and so vast that we may be fashioning a society where everyone with a smartphone and a Wi-Fi connection becomes a self-appointed expert in multiple domains.
— The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

It’s one thing to bang the steering wheel when you don’t understand why your car won’t start when you turn the key. It’s one thing to get frustrated when your home Wi-Fi goes out and running the “TOTO protocol” (Turn it Off, Turn it back On) on your router doesn’t magically fix it in the middle of a big client meeting. But it’s another thing entirely when you don’t understand how to keep yourself and your loved ones safe and healthy during a global pandemic.

If most of us don’t know how a toilet works, think about how poorly we understand the various exotic electronics and Internet sites that pervade our lives these days. We’ll be even more ignorant about how things work in the future.
— The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

Those frustrations and annoyances come, in part, from our lack of true understanding of how things work, but our brains shield us from that ignorance by masking that ignorance in self deception and emotional reactions.

The irony is that successful technology is always easy to use; it always seems familiar. So we will continue to feel a sense of understanding even though our understanding of these increasingly complex systems will be weaker and weaker. Our illusion of understanding will get stronger and stronger.
— The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

Now magnify that on a global scale. That’s what we’re living through in 2020.
We’re suddenly realizing how truly complex the world that we’ve built is, and what happens when we put too much trust in “experts“ and leaders who fail to recognize the limits of their knowledge, and the depth of their expertise.

The problem is that spending a few minutes (or even hours) perusing WebMD is just not a substitute for the years of study needed to develop enough expertise to make a credible medical diagnosis.
— The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

We’ve seen what happens when our physical safety is threatened, and our socially competitive motivations for self-preservation eclipse our socially cooperative abilities and drives. We’ve seen how ignorance and arrogance combine in deadly ways, on an unprecedented scale in modern human history.

Managing your life or running a business today already requires constant access to machines and to the Internet. As technology becomes more sophisticated, we will become even more ignorant about what’s under the hood. We will depend even more on experts to keep it all up and running.
For the most part, this is fine. Until there’s a problem.

Perhaps, a silver lining coming out of a strong contender for “worst year ever” in our collective lifetimes could be the dawn of the Age of Exponential Ignorance. A time in which we collectively recognize and embrace the limits of our knowledge, shatter our individual illusions of explanatory depth, as well as the criticality of the distribution of cognitive labor and expertise in order to overcome our greatest challenges as a society.

When the technology fails — because of neglect, war, or a natural disaster — the complacency induced by our illusion of understanding will come back to bite us. We’ll be lost. Our dependence on experts will be on full display.”
— — The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

And perhaps, if we’re lucky and we work together, we just might literally save the world. One step at a time.