The Case for Teaching Ignorance

There&#x27;s a lot to be said for this, especially in biology, where there&#x27;s so much we don&#x27;t know, and textbooks don&#x27;t make this clear. Brain science is even worse. We still don&#x27;t know how memories are stored, either the mechanism or the format.<p>Economics remains badly understood. The predictive power of economic models is low. Psychology and sociology are even worse.

I think the point here is not that the limits of knowledge are not know, but that the focus of course work often stops at what is know. If you are training future experts you should spend the vast majority of the time focusing on the interesting questions that don&#x27;t have answers right now. The realm of the &#x27;textbook&#x27; known is so small for many scientific domains that in an ideal world it would be relegated to summer reading (yes, I&#x27;m implying one should read most if not all of that 800 page textbook, or many curated sections from it).

This sort of course isn&#x27;t for medical school. Maybe undergrad, but to-be doctors have enough on their plate without focusing on the blank areas of scientific knowledge. Once you at a professional school the time for fostering curiosity is long gone. If you;ve dedicated much of your life to a subject then you are already curious.<p>I hesitate to say such a course could be useful at the highschool level. It would certainly encourage independent leaning and humble many subjects. But it would also become political. It&#x27;s a fine line between teaching the limits of biological knowledge and preaching intelligent design.

I&#x27;d love to see a similar approach to CS-related topics. We don&#x27;t know how to solve many security problems (key delivery, etc). We don&#x27;t know what exactly makes a good user interface (many psychological&#x2F;natural&#x2F;social factors that we aren&#x27;t aware). And we&#x27;re yet to know how to write a correct program, let alone what &quot;correctness&quot; is. We don&#x27;t even know what&#x27;s a good way approach the problem, or even discuss it.

I&#x27;m not sure about the philosophy of it all, but I think the concept to be conveyed is an understanding of how large a domain of knowledge is, and an understating of how little of that domain you have removed the &quot;fog of war&quot; from. Of course, this is a Bayesian interpretation, believing everything exists, we have but to go discover and interpret it.<p>Do others perceive a domain of knowledge to grow and change as one interacts with it and asks questions?

I don&#x27;t buy it. Any academic presentation of a subject includes the limits of current knowledge. Maybe this is not emphasized enough, but it&#x27;s a matter of extent, not a qualitative refusal to acknowledge ignorance.<p>A great example is that mainstream academic economists are <i>very</i> open about not being able to explain why monetary stimulus works. At one point (maybe this goes back to Keynes or even further) people attributed it to sticky prices. But current research cannot come up with a reasonable mechanism based on sticky prices that would explain the magnitude of the effect of monetary policy. Currently people accept that what we observe on the macro level cannot be explained on the micro level.

Medical science has limits? I thought we proved we&#x27;re just finite state machines that are occasionally jostled into unfavorable states that can only balanced by external chemicals.

&quot;We are blind to our blindness.&quot; Daniel Khaneman

It blows my mind that we don&#x27;t know if Japanese intestines are longer than Westerners even though it&#x27;s a popular meme in Japan.

Seems more like she&#x27;s trying to teach a class on relativism, a subject I wholeheartedly hope stays away from science. Additionally, epistemology already exists, and is a well established field of study.