Ignorance (separated by all the things you thought you knew)

Earlier this year The Weather Station, the Canadian indie folk project of Tamara Lindeman, released the album Ignorance. It's a brilliant album, my favorite of the year so far. I very highly recommend it. This post isn't really about the album, but was largely inspired by it.

What connotations does the word "ignorance" have for you? I think it's usually thought of in a negative sense.

With the inside album art of Ignorance, there is a statement about the word:

"Ignorance describes a state of not knowing. A word that describes the wordless, a mystery. A space that requires humility to enter. Ignorance is endless, but anywhere there is ignorance there is the possibility of knowledge, and in the state of flux between not knowing and knowing, there is immense capacity for change."

As I pondered this statement I realized I see a lot of both beauty and truth in it, and also that it's something that seems extra relevant to me after everything that has happened in the past year. A year in which so many people, people on all sides of issues pertaining to the COVID pandemic that has ravaged our world, could have used more humility, more ability to recognize they were in that state of not knowing.

Lindeman is an amazing lyricist; in fact, I don't know that I can think of any album that has lyrics from front to back that consistently grab me more strongly than those on this album. She ponders topics as wide reaching as capitalism, interpersonal relationships, and climate change, and there are so many lines where I just marvel at their power, but I won't go into all of that here. There's one lyric snippet, though, that together with the above words from the liner notes, basically summarizes the theme of what I want to talk about in this post. The song "Separated" lists many things that could separate two people from each other. One item on the list:

Separated by the all the things you thought you knew

One night not too long ago I was listening to the album and reading along with the lyrics and at this line I just thought, wow, that sums up so many of the problems we face, doesn't it?

The idea is applicable to many issues facing our society and world, not just COVID, but COVID has really brought these issues to the fore, at least in my mind.

It seems like society has splintered into different groups, and within each group, people think they know certain things, and reject the possibility that those things they think they know aren't actually true.

It seems like people, not everyone but far too many people, settled into a belief system about COVID within the first couple of months of the pandemic, and then stuck to that belief system going forward no matter what new evidence arose.

Obviously, you have people who think they know that COVID is just like the flu, and health orders are government tyranny, and masks don't work, and now, on top of those other misconceptions, that vaccines are bad. And those misguided beliefs have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, a tragedy the effects of which will be with all of us for the rest of our lives.

But then you also have people who, say, refuse to let their kids have even socially distanced outdoor playdates with other kids. You have cities that kept their playgrounds closed long after new evidence showed this wasn't necessary (and was likely harmful because if you take away a relatively safe outlet for people they're probably more likely to turn to riskier activities!). You have people and businesses and schools devoting ridiculous amounts of time and resources to sanitizing surfaces, because based on what was known in March 2020 they think they know that that's a good way to prevent the spread of COVID, and they never updated what they thought they knew in light of new data.

I'm not trying to "both sides" this by saying the two groups have done equal amounts of damage. If everyone was excessively cautious about COVID instead of a bunch of people being excessively cautious and a bunch of people not being cautious at all, the pandemic curve would have been crushed. Nonetheless, all of these things have done a lot of damage!

I'm a scientist. I wish I could say that scientists are mostly immune to these cognitive defects, but that's not the case. Because a bunch of scientists thought they knew things about how viruses spread through the air that they didn't actually know, our guidance on how to stop the spread was fundamentally flawed from the start, it took far too long to fix that guidance, the effects are still with us to this day, and numerous unnecessary deaths have resulted.

What I wish people could realize is: we should all always be "in the state of flux between not knowing and knowing" and should have the "immense capacity for change" that comes with that.

It's impossible to ever know anything with 100% certainty; the best we can ever hope is to reach a reasonable approximation of that. But far too often we see ourselves as essentially at that 100% when we have no right to claim anywhere near that level of certainty.

There are issues with society's approach to COVID, like whether vaccinating the population is a good strategy to control the virus and reduce illness and death, where there is very little uncertainty about the correct answer (that answer, to this question, is yes, by the way). There are other issues, such as how to handle school reopenings (prior to vaccines being available), where there genuinely were a whole lot of gray areas and uncertainties. Going into all those complexities is beyond the scope of this post, but they are very real. Yet instead of most people being able to acknowledge, with humility, those uncertainties and their ignorance (ignorance not in a negative sense but just as the unavoidable reality of living in a world full of unknowns), you had people on one side vehemently attacking parents who were trying to take an evidence-based risk reduction approach to do what was best for their and other kids and get them back to in-person learning, and you had people on the other side vehemently attacking teachers who had legitimate concerns about whether their schools were employing adequate safety measures.

I think Twitter, and social media in general but particularly, from my experience, Twitter, amplifies these problems. People inhabit different bubbles. Within each bubble, there are certain fundamental beliefs that people think they know are true. Some of those things, to a greater or lesser extent depending on which bubble we're talking about, aren't actually true. But if you tweet something that is popularly held as true within your bubble, regardless of whether it's actually true, you'll get a bunch of likes, and if you tweet something that goes against the conventional wisdom in your bubble, you'll get a bunch of people attacking you. It's not fun to have a bunch of people attacking you, and it's not fun to get in a bunch of unproductive arguments, so people become more and more reluctant to speak up against their bubbles' conventional wisdoms. As a result, the beliefs of a bubble - the things people think they know - become further entrenched.

And you become separated from other members of your society "by all the things you thought you knew."

It's possible, of course, to take the ignorance thing too far. To act like it's impossible to ever know anything at all. "We don't really know for sure that masks work, so I'm not wearing a mask." "We don't really know for sure everything there is to know about what vaccines do, so people shouldn't get vaccinated." "We don't really know for sure how bad climate change will be, so we shouldn't bother trying to do anything about it" (yeah, I had to stick in a non-COVID example because let's face it, it's probably an even bigger crisis).

That's not helpful either. So it can be a fine line to walk. But every day people make decisions, big and small, based on imperfect knowledge - so it's important to realize that sometimes those decisions will turn out to be wrong not through any fault of the people making them but due to the reality of imperfect knowledge - just as it's important to also realize that the reality of imperfect knowledge doesn't justify taking the route of "I'm going to decide the answer is whatever is most convenient for me because no one really knows for sure."

I hope I'm explaining this in a way that makes sense?

Overall, I would urge people to realize that all knowledge can only be expressed in degrees of uncertainty and that those degrees of uncertainty can range from very uncertain to very close to certain. And that within a given field, there will be experts, whose opinions generally should be given more weight than those of a non-expert, but still aren't guaranteed to be true (see the "is COVID airborne" issue!).

I would also urge people to always, always be looking for ways that their own beliefs might not be true, not just ways that the beliefs of people they disagree with might not be true. I try to do this, as a scientist. To always look for the holes in my own explanations for my data. I'd like to think that scientists, on average, are better at doing this than are most people, but if this is true, it's not by nearly as big a margin as many think. I'd also like to think that I'm better at this than are most scientists. (My PhD advisor had a term, the "skeptical Jeff response," for the tough but ultimately helpful questions I would ask at lab meetings to illuminate potential missing pieces of other lab members' projects, and I try really hard to take the same approach to my own work.) I don't know for sure whether this is true, but I try my best.

I would also like to bring up some very relevant words from another musician whose work I love, although in this case they do not come from his music. Jonathan Meiburg, Shearwater frontman and past Okkervil River member, recently published the utterly fantastic book A Most Remarkable Creature about his studies of the fascinating group of birds known as caracaras. Near the end of the book, he recounts a conversation with paleontologist Julia Clarke while out on a dig:

As we walked, Julia noted how good it felt to escape the clutches of the internet, and how hard it is to avoid the trap of thinking that everything worth knowing is a Google search away. For the moment, no one but us knew about the fossils we carried in our packs, any one of which might have the power to change our understanding of the past, and there was an undeniable sweetness in standing at the very edge of a small part of human knowledge.

...

"The more I think about it," said Julia, "the more I think this idea - that the world is known - is what keeps people from committing to a life of discovery."

There's something beautiful about recognizing our fundamental ignorance about the world. Because it means there is always more to learn about the world. Our endless capacity to learn new things is one of the most remarkable things about being human (although an endless capacity to learn is most certainly not unique to humans - but perhaps the capacity to recognize that we have an endless capacity to learn is?). There is an infinite amount to learn about the world, and people should always be wary of settling too firmly on any particular belief, but rather should always be on the lookout for new evidence that could modify that belief. This is true about COVID and it's true about so many other things.

Rather than being separated by all the things we think we know, let's be joined by the awareness of how much we don't know.

Do I have high hopes that society will change in its approach to this problem? No, not really, but if I can get a few people thinking about it, and they can get a few other people thinking about it, well, that's something.

Also, check out Ignorance by The Weather Station. It's amazing. That's one thing I do know.