Nehaveigur

Knowledge is power! Knowledge is what our civilization is built on. All those medieval monks dedicating their lives to understanding how the universe works? You know more about it than they ever did. You know about atoms and planets and bacteria. They didn’t. Maybe they had some other kind of knowledge.

Knowledge is power! Everyone agrees on that. So why Three Cheers for Ignorance? Is it because I’m an insufferable contrarian? Yes, but hear me out.

How can knowing less ever be an advantage? Here’s an example: You ask Americans which foreign cities they had have heard of. Have you heard of Berlin? Have you heard of Frankfurt? Have you heard of Lübeck? And so on. Some people had only heard of Berlin. They didn’t know much about German geography. Others knew a lot more. Then they asked the volunteers to rank a list of German cities by size.

Who do you think did better? Those who knew a lot about German geography, or those who knew little? Surprisingly, those who knew little did better. People who had only heard about a few cities before reasoned that those cities were the bigger ones, so they ranked them first. And it worked! However those who recognized all the cities didn’t have any way to rank them. Having more information put them at a disadvantage. This is an example of the familiarity heuristic.

Here’s another example: There are many situations where it’d be useful to know if someone is lying. Maybe you’re wondering right now if I made up the experiment with the German cities.

Consider the police questioning a suspect. They will tape or film these interrogations. The recordings are reviewed later to figure out if the suspect is lying.

If this were your job, would you prefer to watch the video and listen to the audio, or would you prefer to listen to the audio only? It turns out that most people are better at detecting lies when only listening. The reason seems to be that peoples’ voices tend to give away more and watching them at the same time is only a distraction. Again, having more information puts you at a disadvantage.

Clearly, the problem is not all and any knowledge. The problem is useless knowledge. At best, useless knowledge is just useless. At worst, it’s a distraction from what’s important. It’s easy for me to say that some knowledge is useless. But how do we know which knowledge is useless and which isn’t?

One way to avoid useless knowledge is not to keep up with the 24 hour new cycle.

Consider the upcoming presidential elections. You probably have a candidate you favor. Now you hear that his most recent polling numbers are down by 3%. That makes you anxious. Maybe you even go online to find some analysis that explain this. In the end, you’re probably still anxious and you’ve wasted time. The next day, there’s another poll, and this time his numbers are up. The problem is that a lot of poll-to-poll variation is noise. Trying to keep up with every single poll means that you’re reacting to noise.

Polls are an example, but a lot of other day-to-day events that are noisy as well. The announcements of mayors and congresswomen and congressmen and ministers and supreme leaders hardly ever change the course of history. The announcement of pundits and TV hosts never do. So why not just ignore them?

As citizens it’s our duty to make informed choices. That means knowing what’s going on. But it doesn’t mean knowing what’s going on every hour or day. Maybe week to week, or month to month is enough. That way, you can focus on the data and ignore the noise.

Maybe instead of Three cheers for ignorance I should’ve gone for Three cheers for ignoring the noise, but then would you have read this?