Rediscovering Ignorance

We’ve all heard this stated as if it’s the key to success: underpromise and overdeliver. Set expectations low, exceed them, and you’ll always come out ahead.

Before there were computers, there were computers. People, mostly women, who spent their working days performing calculations by hand—multiplying, dividing, checking each other’s arithmetic, passing columns of figures down a chain of desks. They were called computers because that was their job. To compute.

I tend to believe that abstractions are real things. When I look at a tree, there is something really there—it is not “merely” a collection of atoms. The atoms are arranged as they are because they are part of something larger, something we are able to recognize and have given a name.

We tend to think of morality as a kind of compass. Some possible worlds are better than others—more just, less painful, more full of flourishing—and morality, on this view, is what points us toward those better worlds, or what we use to measure how close to them we are.

Imagine yourself walking along a very long road. This road stretches far into the distance, beyond the horizon. You walk and walk and walk, your entire life, never finding the end. In your final days, you ponder whether the road is in fact infinitely long. What you know for sure is that it is too long for you to traverse in your lifetime. But does that mean the road is infinite, or simply that you didn’t live long enough? If you could continue walking another 500 years, would you reach the end?

We live in an age of abundant access to information. With information comes knowledge—or so thought the idealists who led us down this path. Over time, we came to understand the darker side of “Information wants to be free.” Information can be true or false, illuminating or deceptive, intended to empower or to manipulate. Just as importantly, there are practical limits to the how much information a human being can consume.