Unknown Unknowns

The school year is over. All of my fourth year friends have graduated. I saw a couple of them at the reception, but not many. I probably won't be seeing the rest of them again for a long time. Months, and in one person's case at least a year. The thing that bothers me is that I could have had a chance. A bunch of them were all doing a last dinner together. I could have said all of my goodbyes then rather than do it over the phone.

But I missed it. Because I had a train ticket home, and I couldn't miss the train. And I got the ticket before I found out about this dinner. If I'd have known I would have delayed my departure a day. As it is, I lost out on a very important thing to me.

When we do the 'wrong thing', sometimes it's because of a faulty judgment. But sometimes it's because we don't realize there are judgments we can make. How can you rationally choose between two options if you don't know you have the power to choose? How can you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of an action if you don't know you have to weigh them? This is why I missed the dinner. I didn't realize that they'd want a last dinner before they all parted ways. I would have stayed if I knew it was happening. Does that make me irrational for leaving? No, it's a sad reminder of how a lack of information can completely destroy our ability to make good decisions.

The rational solution to this is to ensure that you have all of the information. But the kind we are dealing with is not the known unknowns, when you are aware there are options but have yet to find them. These are the unknown unknowns. You could reason with yourself for a hundred years and never realize the options are there, simply because realizing you have gaps in your knowledge requires outside information that you do not have. But more likely you'll never reason with yourself in the first place, because you don't realize you should.

But what I think is a thousand times worse is the information that you do have, but that you don't remember is relevant. Three hours into the train ride I remembered that Amtrak doesn't have a surcharge for changing your departures dates. I could have gone to that dinner after all. But I didn't.

I can cry about unknown unknowns all I want, but that doesn't get me any closer to coping with it. And we have to find a way of coping with it, if only so we can make the "right" choice more often. Thankfully, though, this is the kind of problem that solves itself. Every time we get burned by the unknown unknowns they're no longer invisible. You know to watch out for them in the future.

This is another good reason why we should have as many experiences and encounters as possible. It makes it more likely that you'll be hit by an unknown unknown in a situation where it doesn't hurt you too badly, so you're aware of it when it's actually important to be aware. And it means that the situations come up way more often, so you more quickly learn to deal with a wide range of unknown unknowns.

Looking back, I think I know what to call the knowledge of unknown unknowns. It's wisdom.