Journal Entry
The 3 types of knowledge
Steve Schwartz writes about the 3 kinds of knowledge out there.
To really understand how it is that no one knows what they’re doing, we need to understand the three fundamental categories of information.
There’s the shit you know, the shit you know you don’t know, and the shit you don’t know you don’t know.
Understanding the Dunning-Kruger effect through the lens of his above essay is helped by thinking of dangerous people in organizations as being those who have a lot of stuff they don’t know they don’t know.
[h/t to Jeremiah Tolbert for the link]
Filed under the topic Journal on February 13th 2010 at 9:25 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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1. Phiala on Feb 13th, 2010 at 10:54 am
But that omits the shit you think you know but don’t, and that may be the worst one of all:
“I know that global warming is a conspiracy.”
“I know the government is out to get me.”
“I know that vaccinating my children is the wrong thing to do.”
And so on. I suppose you could lump it in with “shit you don’t know you don’t know”, but I consider that to be a different problem.
2. Kylinn on Feb 13th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
@Phiala – Wouldn’t that be a sub-set of Shit You Don’t Know You Don’t Know?
3. Michael Canfield on Feb 13th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_unknown
4. CharlesP on Feb 16th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
That subset thing is actually brought up in an update on that page (and I’ve been passing this link around to coworkers and friends now Tobias… thanks!)
5. Tobias Buckell on Feb 16th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
No problem. It’s a very interesting essay. Wish I’d read it when younger, as it took me a long time to draw some similar conclusions about ignorance and so forth.
6. CharlesP on Feb 21st, 2010 at 8:10 am
I subscribe to the Operation Ivy theory of knowledge “All I know is that I don’t know nothing, and that’s fine.” I suspect it might not have originated with them…