🚩Note: This is a working draft - thinking out loud (and in public)

I think ignorance gets a bad rap. It’s a term that comes with a lot of baggage and is often not taken lightly when given as a label to someone. This post is a defense of ignorance, and how it can, sometimes, be the most crucial ingredient in a problem solving toolkit.

Ignorance, when deliberate, is what separates the transdisciplinary from those live by hard lines between disciplines

Not wrong, just right adjacent

A recent interaction with my daughter inspired me to re-consider my views on ignorance. Since then, I see ignorance as a key part of almost every problem solving technique I employ daily. Software engineering, systems thinking, teaching and especially mathematics rely extensively on our abilities to be cognitively fluid through carefully selecting what to ignore.

As we hiked a nice flat trail somewhere in Phoenix AZ, I noticed my daughter had stopped walking and is sitting down staring at a hole in the ground. She was pointing at it, asking what it was. I could see she was very fascinated by it, so I turned the question back to her to encourage her to guess. Never in a million years, would I have expected the response.

It is clearly not a belly button, its a hole in the ground - not even an interesting one actually. However, even though its difficult to have predicted the levels of abstraction (and transferability of concepts) used, its not difficult to accept that it as a reasonable guess from a 19 month old child.

If you are willing to accept this might be a belly button, consider the concious reasoning that you performed to make it reasonable. You likely had to bring up the definitions and perhaps conjure up images of belly buttons and holes in the gound, you then looked for the slightest ways that these two things could be related. And when you find one dimension that is shared by the two, everything falls in place.

From here on out, I am assuming you were able to stretch your mind far enough to see the similarities between a belly button and a hole in the ground. Or a similar scenario.

Ignorance is abstraction in easy mode

If ignorance is the lack of knowledge or inforamtion, abstraction is the removing of knowledge and information*. In which case, abstraction takes more effort than ignorance.

A child, whose universe of things, $U_c$ is considerably smaller than the adult whose universe of things, $U_a$ - infact, $U_c \subseteq U_a$

Naturally, humans are great at reasoning and abstracting away distractions to focus on the bigger objective. When driving, thinking about the engine is a waste of precious cognitive resources [Ref]. Being naturally cognitive load adverse is what makes the deliberate sifting and removal of information/knowledge such a difficult endevour. The child with a smaller set of things can simply do pattern matching on their existing knowledge to come up with a (not wrong, right adjacent) guess for what that hole in the gound is.

*Okay, the keen reader can immediately see that removal of information can cause both a state of “incompleteness” or “no information”. Fair enough, here I am abstracting “removing distracting/non-essential details” to “removing of knowledge and information”. I’m confident you can apply your own ignorance to follow along.

If you find abstraction too difficult to do, try ignorance