There’s a pet peeve of mine that I’m realizing has a major, existential undercurrent. You might have experienced it, too:

I’ll be having a conversation in which the other person mentions something — a film, a singer, a bit of lore from somewhere — and I confess that I’m not familiar with said thing. At which point they do a double-take and act genuinely surprised. Sometimes their reaction is goggle-eyed and mouth-gaping. Other times it’s more discreet. But the words are nearly always the same. “You don’t know who MC Hammer is?” “You’ve never seen Titanic?” “You’ve never heard of [Insert phenomenon’s name here]?”

This reaction isn’t meant to be rude, and I’m not sure I’d even call it rude. It does put me on the spot in an unexpected way, though. (I’m reminded of that crass old saying, “when you assume, you make an ass of U and Me”). With some genuine good will on both sides, there’s no need to make a big deal out of it. I walk away from the conversation slightly more educated while trying to be charitable enough to not feel too annoyed. And until recently, I didn’t give these kinds of interactions much more thought. ¹

But now it’s becoming clearer to me why assuming someone shares the same knowledge as you is problematic. It’s not just that we’re more different from each other than we might think. It’s more fundamental than that: the problem is in failing to appreciate just how much there is to know and experience, and the gaps in knowledge this causes for ourselves and others that can never be filled because our time and brains are too limited. It’s a failure at the imaginative level. And it’s a very common problem for most humans, including me.

The psychologist Lee Ross came up with a helpful term for this: “naïve realism.” It’s the mistaken belief that what seems most important and apparent to us is true for everyone else, too. A popular example for this is religious or political dogma. But you can apply it to even the silliest things. One famous example Ross mentions is that of the “tappers”: in one experiment, two people were paired up; one had to tap out a tune on the surface of the table, while the other person had to guess what the tune was. Because the tapper knew what the tune was, she could hear it clearly in her own mind (“isn’t it obvious that I’m playing ‘Surfin’ USA?’”). The tappers thought the guessers had, on average, a 50% likelihood of getting the tune right. In reality, the guessers had an abysmal 2.5% average. Banging on the surface of plastic and plywood doesn’t sound musical unless there’s already music in your head. ²

Socrates was one of the first thinkers to explicitly resist this kind of bias: “I only know that I don’t know,” was one of his mantras. “Epistemic humility” is sort of the buzzword for this today. And humility is indeed a key part of it. But moral exhortations often backfire. “You should be humbler! You should be less judgmental!” is not the most inspiring advice, even if it’s nominally true. I think the solution, instead, lies in focusing on our sense of awe and curiosity.

For this, I prefer the term “learned ignorance.” Docta ignorantia was coined by Augustine, but you can find this throughline running from Socrates all the way to Montaigne and Blaise Pascal. Here is how 15-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa explains it:

If we can fully attain unto this [knowledge of our ignorance], we will attain unto learned ignorance. For a man – even one very well versed in learning — will attain unto nothing more perfect than to be found to be most learned in the ignorance which is distinctively his. The more he knows that he is unknowing, the more learned he will be. ³

Both Nicholas of Cusa and Petrarch use the analogy of a night owl who only sees the reflected light of the moon. The idea here is that we can’t grasp the fullness of reality, just as an owl can’t look directly at the sun. The owl is ignorant, and so are we; but we can choose to learned in our ignorance.

Seeking new knowledge is good, but what’s just as important and much more difficult is getting a feel for the knowledge we don’t know. The “unknown unknowns.” Some of this is knowledge we don’t have currently, but could theoretically obtain. Some of it is knowledge that may be impossible to know, at least for now. In either case, we have far less time on earth than we do the number of things worth knowing.

Discouraging, isn’t it? Maybe not. I personally think that what makes the cosmos wondrous is the fact it’s so full of phenomena that we can never fully know. There are all tangible things like baobab trees and okapis and asteroids and abyssal oceans that we understand less than outer space — and yet these are in some ways far easier to understand than ourselves and each other. They aren’t less interesting, but they tend to be less controversial. This, to me, is learned ignorance: it’s being endlessly hopeful of learning more, while being glad we can’t know everything. Otherwise, we would run out of things to learn and problems to ponder.

“You want to explain everything by the facts that are known to you,” Joseph Joubert wrote to himself in his notebook in the early 19^th century. “But the facts that are not known to you? What do they say?” What indeed. We may discover some of them later, we may not; I think what matters most is knowing we’re limited, even when we’re not sure how we’re limited.

And when we do so, we won’t be as surprised when we learn a friend or an acquaintance of ours hasn’t seen Titanic or been to New York City or has a very different view of an issue that’s dear to us. We’ll still be ignorant, but we’ll be learned in it — and that’s a far more interesting place to be.

***

Read Next: Why I Stopped Making “To-Do” List for My Life →

1. Luckily, they seem to be less frequent the older I get. I’m sure there are multiple possibilities for why that is
2. Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In T. Brown, E. Reed, & E. Turiel (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
3. Nicholas of Cusa. De Docta Ignorantia [1440]. Translated by Jasper Hopkins as Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance: A Translation and an Appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1985.