I don't know
I don't know
An essay (ish) about knowing and not knowing and how knowing something isn't the same as thinking you know something.
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We don't know much at all. You and I both know more things than some people, but less than others. We know different things to different extents with different levels of complexity, but really, if I think about it long enough, I don't know anything.
Too often I have a conversation and think to myself, ‘damn, I wish I'd asked more questions’, or 'I wish I'd listened more'. I’m lucky enough to know and work with a lot of very intelligent and interesting people who operate under the assumption that they know a lot of things. And they do. They know a lot of things because of their personal experiences and interests, things I could find out for myself if I tried hard enough, some things I’ll never be able to find out myself, and some things that I think I know, but not nearly to the same extent as they do.
My hypothesis is this: As soon as you think you know something you limit your thinking to only what you know and not what’s real. Of course it is possible to know something very well, perhaps better than anyone else, or for everyone to know something collectively with a large amount of certainty. But the moment you think you know something, is moment you stop being able to learn more.
Collective knowing
Recently at work I needed to come up with something called ‘a release plan’. A checklist of things we need to do when we release new things. I asked two other people to come up with what they thought the release plan should be and then organized to discuss what we’d come up with at the end of the week.
Now, I didn't have to ask them, I've done releases before, I know what’s supposed to happen, so I could have put together a release plan myself and said, 'okay, this is it, let's go.' But I'm glad I didn't.
During the week they both sent me their understanding of a release plan. One sent me an ordered list that included some of the things I was thinking about but also things I hadn't considered even relevant. The other sent me a list of things in a similar way but one that also included to dos for a launch; a bigger version of a release than I was thinking with other ideas that I hadn't considered.
I had these three lists of things with some overlap but an obvious amount of misalignment. We were all talking about a release, but we all knew different things. I thought I knew what a release was but in fact I just knew what I thought a release was. Which raised the question, what is a release? What were we trying to do? Thinking about that too long ran the risk of getting far too naval gazy, so instead I decided we weren't going to talk about our lists at the end of the week, we were going to work to to create a collective understanding of a release is.
And it worked, we discussed and narrowed down and summarized what a release means to us, we talked about why we do them, what the outcomes of them should be, and what is required to make it happen. I could then distill all of this into a checklist of things that we can burn through and there you have it, a release plan. The result is something that’s better than each individuals thinking and more than the sum of their parts.
I knew what a release was and what a release plan should be, to me, but I didn't know what other people knew it to be, so I accepted I didn't know and asked the question. Now I still don't know what a release plan is, but I have a very good idea of what the three of us think it is. And that's good enough for me.
Dependent knowing
It's one thing to think you know something and a whole other thing for it to actually be true. I know that two plus two equals four. I bet you think that’s a pretty well accepted thing to know. So, why does two plus two equal four? Well because if you have two things here and two things there, when you put them together you have four things. But if you gave that statement to someone who only reads Japanese they’re not going to have any idea what you mean until you show them. Or, if someone thinks that ‘two’ means ‘grass’ and ‘four’ means ‘duck’ then you’re just talking nonsense.
This kind of knowing is entirely dependent on people sharing a common understanding in order to know something else. That’s one of the ways maths is great, because numbers often transcend languages. For well accepted, relatively fundamental things like basic arithmetic you can be pretty confident in your knowing, good job. But what happens when you apply this kind of dependent knowing to every day conversations?
Every person you speak to has a different experience, which means there are going to be things that they understand differently to you. The more abstract or complicated, or poorly understood something is, the more likely you are to run into dependencies in other people’s understandings that lead you to ‘unknowing’.
This typically either leads to some lovely discussion, or to someone deciding on behalf of everyone else that their knowing is correct. Both can be valid approaches, often times knowing something is only worthwhile if it’s useful, and so it can be more important that people understand the same thing than that everyone’s understanding is necessarily correct. But we’re diverging and that’s a dangerous line of thought.
Not long ago I was trying to work out the best way to structure product documentation for work given that we were moving to a new platform to store things. I decided it would be a good opportunity to reorganise things to solve some exisiting issues and try to anticipate some problems we'd have in the future. I thought I knew how it should be done. I sat down, I mapped it out using a bulleted tree structure and was happy with it. (
This is
a bulleted
tree structure
list thing
) I was sure I knew the best way to do it. But just in case I'd missed something I sent it to someone else I knew to have experience with this kind of thing and asked what they thought. They came back with a whole lot of questions and suggestions. A lot of the questions were good but I was confused, why couldn't they see that this was the right way to do things.
I set up a meeting, I sat down with them and answered question after question, but we went around in circles. Instead, I brought up a blank document and we started from scratch. Talking it through and working together we came out with another bulleted tree list that we were both happy with. After the meeting I compared what we had done together to what I had done previously, and they were the same.
We'd changed some words around that ultimately meant the same thing but the whole structure was the same. ‘Huh.’ I thought to myself. I knew something that had turned out to be true, but me knowing it alone didn't make it true, only when we both knew it was I right in saying I knew. This poses something of a problem. If in order to know something other people have to know it too, then knowing is a collective verb and everything becomes a lot harder. In this particular instance the question became; how many people need to know for this to be true? I decided all of the leaders in the team that would be using the documentation would be enough.
I got them all together and I presented the idea we'd come up and everyone quickly had lots of questions and pulled it a part. 'Who's going to be using it like this though?' 'What about the people writing in the doucmentation, is this what matters most to them?', ‘Why do we need to structure all of this at all?’ So, naturally, after a bit of blah blah we started from scratch.
I went quiet and played the part of keyboard monkey - people called out and agreed on ideas and I wrote them down. By the end of the discussion when everyone was happy with what we had come up with I went back and looked at the original structure I'd put together the week before. They were the same. A couple of times during the discussion with the wider team we had almost diverged, but we eventually came to the same conclusions.
So I did know the right way to structure these things in the beginning, but what does it matter what I know if the others didn't know and had problems with it. This way, we all knew the way and we were better for having come to know these things together.
There's an argument to be made that instead of having the discussion I could have tried to enforce the way I knew to begin with and everyone might have come around to it and realised it was a good way, but would they? Do I know it's right because I know it's right, or do I know it's right because the others agreed?
Knowing anything
A few years ago an old boss said to me something like, 'You see, Rhys here doesn’t know anything about anything' in response to me not knowing the answer to a question. I think about that sometimes. He wasn’t the kindest communicator but really he meant I don't have deep technical or 'specialised' skills, experience, or knowledge in the topic and so what I knew was pretty much irrelevant. And indeed he was right. Everything I knew about the topic was certainly already known by everyone else in the room so I effectively knew nothing.
If we’d taken that discussion out of the room and started it up again with a stranger, suddenly I would know quite a bit. No more than I did earlier but relatively a lot more. Which raises the question, is knowing relative? Well, maybe, but I don’t think so, if we think about what I called ‘collective knowing’ and ‘dependent knowing’ I think we’ll find that while one person can know a lot more than another person about a specific topic; with enough people or enough other knowledge you can come to know the same things. Hmm, that’s a mouthful, let’s do one more example to try and illustrate what I mean.
Starting in 1998 and continuing to develop into the early 2000s Nokia came up with ‘Symbian’, a closed platform operating system for mobile phones, the software that let you interact and do things on early mobile phones. Nokia knew what they were doing with Symbian, they’d started something big, they were the experts, and they knew what people wanted.
As smartphones became popular in the late 2000s, the people who made the software to go on Symbian and the users of the phones began to want a more flexible and customizable platform. New ways of using the phones came around and people wanted to try things. I don’t know a lot of the details, I’m sure Symbian tried to improve things and tried to give users what they wanted, but ultimately not a lot changed.
The users and the developers asking for things didn’t know as much as Nokia did about Symbian, in fact they already knew everything their users knew, so as far as Nokia was concerned, the people asking for things knew nothing.
Along comes Android, a free and open-source operating system for mobile devices that was developed by the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) (now maintained by Google). It’s probably unfair to say the people at the OHA knew nothing about how to build mobile operating systems but perhaps they didn’t know as much as Nokia.
Android provided the ability for anyone to create custom apps and modify the operating system to suit their needs and the needs of the users. Rather than trying to enforce what they know, they went for the collective knowing, letting anyone who was interested enough contribute to what they think a mobile operating system should be. And rather than rely on a select group of highly specialised mobile operating system developers like Nokia (although I’m sure Android had a few of those in the beginning too) they opened it up so anyone with the right skills could make things for the operating system. Developers who thought totally differently, who perhaps hadn’t made anything for mobile before were able to contribute.
Android became widely popular and captured a significant share of the smartphone market, it quickly passed Symbian in terms of both popularity and functionality. Android succeeded partly because it became more than the sum of a lot of collective knowledge and because the people who worked on it knew a lot of things about a tremendous variety of other different things.
The only thing you needed to know was how to contribute to the operating system and then you could contribute what else you know, rather than your ability to contribute being dependent on knowing all of the same things as Nokia. Today, Android is the most widely used mobile operating system in the world, it runs on billions of devices and enables developers and users to create and customise their mobile experiences from top to bottom.
I used Android as an example because it has become a huge source of knowing for many people given it’s popularity and connection to the internet, but there are so many stories of people who ‘don’t know anything’ relative to people who ‘know things’ putting their heads together to create collective knowing and understanding their dependent knowledge to win out against the people who ‘know it all’.
Conclusion
I've come to think that as soon as I think I know something for sure I'm probably about to get it wrong. So much of knowing, especially when working or talking with people is about shared knowing, about creating a shared understanding. When I’m talking to people, I want to try to remember that I don’t really know much at all and should endeavor to acquire more knowing by listening for collective knowledge. And I want to ask a lot of questions when I think I know something because knowing something in a useful way is entirely dependent on someone else’s understanding too.
Here follows bonus words I didn’t want to put in the main body because it was even more abstract and silly.
Universal perspective
Of all the things that exist to know, what we as a species think we know is so infinitesimally small that we could say it’s equivalent to nothing. You might say, ‘well we actually do know a lot, we know a lot more than we did a hundred years ago for example', and while this is true, a very small amount plus a very small amount, is still a very small amount, even if we think about the collective knowing of the whole species. Let me try to put it into perspective in terms of time and matter.
Try to think of everything that exists right now that you could know about. From the number of grains of sand in the Sahara, to the wing span of the duck flying over Montana, to how fast a fish is currently swimming to escape the jaws of a shark. Yea, you can't. There is too much to wrap your head around, and that's just things that are existing, not abstract ideas or concepts like how a rural community in Bangladesh could be governed, or when a reindeer farmer in north east Russia will have breakfast, or how an engineer working at Google monitors the performance of a new kind of server.
And that's just within the confines of this planet. What about how many planets are in the galaxy, or when an asteroid is going to fall into a star, or where other life is in the universe. And those are all things that in theory we could all come know, but what about all the things we don't even know why we don't know, like what was before the big bang, what are dreams for, and why are sea gulls such ass holes. And that's just in terms of matter, what about time, what's going to happen tomorrow? What was your great grandmother doing on this day when she was your age? Was it a Tuesday when the dinosaurs went extinct? Will it be be a Wednesday when the Universe finally ends in heat death?
We don't know. We can guess at a lot of these things, for a lot of them we can even work out a probability of whether or not we might be right to give us some comfort in not knowing, but if you go deep enough, if you ask 'why' enough times you're always going to end up with 'I don't know'.
But all of that's pretty incomprehensible. Yes, the Universe is infinite and we're so small and insignificant, sure, but also we're here, we're an amazing collection of matter than has consciousness and can actually wonder and want, despite all the unknown. So while we don't know everything about the Universe, the fact that we know that we don’t and the fact we're trying to work it all out (that's what science is) is pretty great.
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