Question
How do you know what you don't know you don't know?
Answer
Let's call 'em UU's (unknown-unknowns). Here's a breakdown:
1. Continuous UUs: things you find if you get to the boundary of your current knowledge. A literal example is spatial knowledge. As you wander, UUs pop-up from beyond the horizon.
2. Disjoint-set UUs: space is continuous, but most knowledge domains actually are not. If you hop along the positive integers, you'll never reach a boundary or discover negative integers. You need to ask a frame-bustin' question like "what happens if I subtract 5 from 3?" to get there. Knowledge is kinda like that. If you just creep along pushing the boundary of what you know, you can never get to certain things. A clearer example is learning-by-meeting-others. Suppose you primarily learn new things by meeting new people, and you ONLY meet people via people you already know. You could easily inhabit a social network that doesn't get to other networks, and therefore never learn from disjoint networks.
3. Creative-Destructive UUs: Often to get to a new UU, you have to decide to disbelieve what you think you know, even if it seems silly. Einstein deciding that the velocity of light was constant for all observers seemed like a silly and obvious falsehood to anyone with a basic intuition about relative velocity. That was a jump to a UU. Non-Euclidean geometries arrived at by assuming that the self-evident parallel postulate was wrong, is another example.
4. Doubt: this is my favorite. You can sense UUs before you actually notice them. Your reaction is called doubt. "Something is wrong here, I am missing something..."
5. True UUs: By definition, you won't know it till it hits you, and then you'll be utterly surprised. They don't even creep up on you via doubt. In some ways this is the only true kind of UU. Everything else is an outlier variety of KUs (known unknowns).
1. Continuous UUs: things you find if you get to the boundary of your current knowledge. A literal example is spatial knowledge. As you wander, UUs pop-up from beyond the horizon.
2. Disjoint-set UUs: space is continuous, but most knowledge domains actually are not. If you hop along the positive integers, you'll never reach a boundary or discover negative integers. You need to ask a frame-bustin' question like "what happens if I subtract 5 from 3?" to get there. Knowledge is kinda like that. If you just creep along pushing the boundary of what you know, you can never get to certain things. A clearer example is learning-by-meeting-others. Suppose you primarily learn new things by meeting new people, and you ONLY meet people via people you already know. You could easily inhabit a social network that doesn't get to other networks, and therefore never learn from disjoint networks.
3. Creative-Destructive UUs: Often to get to a new UU, you have to decide to disbelieve what you think you know, even if it seems silly. Einstein deciding that the velocity of light was constant for all observers seemed like a silly and obvious falsehood to anyone with a basic intuition about relative velocity. That was a jump to a UU. Non-Euclidean geometries arrived at by assuming that the self-evident parallel postulate was wrong, is another example.
4. Doubt: this is my favorite. You can sense UUs before you actually notice them. Your reaction is called doubt. "Something is wrong here, I am missing something..."
5. True UUs: By definition, you won't know it till it hits you, and then you'll be utterly surprised. They don't even creep up on you via doubt. In some ways this is the only true kind of UU. Everything else is an outlier variety of KUs (known unknowns).