Ignorance

I’m sure everyone has heard some sort of advice along the lines of “clean your room”, from Jordan Peterson’s Book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” to Admiral William H. McRaven’s “Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World”, I recommend both of these books, but definitely Peterson’s. While these two books tackle this advice from different angles, Peterson’s angle is more of making sure you have your own life in order before you tackle any larger problems. While McRaven’s angle is more of knocking out something small and easy like making your bed so you have more confidence to take on the rest of your day. While I think these are good things to live by in your day to day life, I think this is just as important in the conversations we have today, especially given how polarized everyone is right now.

So why do we even have conversations? Seriously, is the purpose of having a conversation to learn more from someone else, to challenge your thoughts, to further a relationship or gain a relationship, or is it just so you can feel good about proving the other side wrong? It seems like we have lost what the purpose is of having conversations to begin with. We should all sort out the reasons we have for engaging with someone else in conversation before we start having it. If you find yourself reacting to something that makes you angry, maybe you shouldn’t have that conversation right now. Maybe you should calm down, gather yourself, gather the facts, then engage in a civil discussion, and be open to the fact that you are probably wrong. You could spend your entire life studying one subject and still not have mastered it, so it seems pretty likely that you are wrong in something you aren’t an expert in, and also pretty likely you are wrong in something that you are an expert in. There is something called the “Unread Library Effect” which is mentioned in a book called “How to Have Impossible Conversations” by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. This comes from a 1998 paper titled “The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation” by Robert A. Wilson and Frank Keil, which studies the ignorance a person can have on a subject, even though they believe to be knowledgeable on that subject. In the book “How to Have Impossible Conversations”, they refer to this as the “Unread Library Effect”, they describe it using this analogy: “Think about this like borrowing books from the great library of human knowledge and then never reading the books. We think we possess the information in the books because we have access to them, but we don’t have the knowledge because we’ve never read the books, much less studied them in depth.”. It is important to realize just how ignorant you are and how much knowledge you have to gain from everyone else.

It’s not my intent to insult anyone by posting all of this, but rather an attempt to humble anyone reading this. In a world where everyone is sharing posts on social media that make bold statements with no room for a difference of opinion or nuance without assuming the other person is evil, we need to be humbled. The person that holds a different view from you that is on the “other” side, they hold that view for a reason and it’s probably a good reason. So instead of attacking them, why don’t you try understanding them? Maybe once you understand them, you can give them an argument that makes them change your mind. Or better yet, maybe they can change your mind.