On Not Knowing What We Know
Plus, the Big Five US publishers over time
Issue No. 53
The other day a journalist I follow referenced this quote, familiar to anyone who was around in 2002 and tracking world affairs.
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.1
At the time, I’d dismissed it as a punchline. But this past week it got me thinking2 about the different ways we can be ignorant. And how knowing about those different types of not-knowing can be useful when we’re reasoning about something.
To make the thought concrete, I took a question many of us have grappled with at some point and traced it:
Should Jane leave a stable job to pursue something she cares more about?
Known knowns (1). What are things Jane knows for sure? Her current salary, her savings runway, her skills, her dependents, her tolerance for risk. These are facts she’d put in a spreadsheet or in a list if she wants to be deliberate. They might not all be top of mind, but she can quickly organize them so they are.
Known unknowns (2). What are things Jane doesn’t know? Will the new path she’ll take be viable in a year or two? Will she enjoy her pursuit as much once it becomes a job? How do people who made similar choices feel looking back? She might not have answers to these questions, but she can certainly look into them.
Unknown unknowns (3). What are all the kinds of things that could happen? This is the entire set of things Jane doesn’t know and can’t reasonably anticipate, unless she wants to spend her nights ruminating. For instance, the person she might meet on the new path who entirely changes her life’s direction. The health episode that reshuffles her priorities. Some industry shift that makes her old job obsolete. While she can’t research every one of these questions, being mindful that such things exist might help steer her thinking.
There’s a fourth one that doesn’t appear in the original framing.
Unknown knowns (4). What are things Jane knows, but she doesn’t know she knows? For instance, let’s say she has a tendency to do her best work under pressure, but she’s never consciously registered that about herself. Or say her conflation of financial outcome and success is a conviction instilled in her from familial or societal expectations about worth and value. These are things she is only superficially aware of, but are largely below the surface. She’s never had to (or maybe doesn’t want to) think about them much.
Which of the four is most consequential?
The original quote suggests unknown unknowns (3) are the ones that catch us most off guard. But in researching this topic, I came across another perspective:
[T]he main dangers lie in the ‘unknown knowns’—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.3
The excerpt suggests that we sometimes put on a blindfold. I’d add that sometimes the blindfold has always been there; we were either comfortable with it being on or we never learned how to remove it. Once we learn how, we’re able to give nebulous things names, and in doing so, turn an unknown known (4) into a known unknown (2), and from then on work on it.
In the case of Jane, if she goes on a long walk or sits down with a counselor, if she learns that the feeling inside her pushing her to consider leaving for something else is actually due to her proneness to boredom, that’s now something that has a name. And she can look into what to do about it.
So my vote is for unknown knowns (4) as most worthy of our attention.
Taken together, we have a taxonomy that can help us make moves on four fronts any time we’re faced with a decision under uncertainty:
Known knowns: things worth organizing, say in a checklist or a spreadsheet.
Known unknowns: things worth researching.
Unknown unknowns: things worth contemplating, in order to stay flexible and avoid over-optimizing.
Unknown knowns: deep-seated assumptions we can surface through honest, patient, iterative questioning.
Now I’d like to move on to discussing unknown known unknowns … (Just kidding; editing this piece was a nightmare as is.)
The Big Five US publishers over time
Ten years ago, I started a small side project to visualize the big five US trade book publishers and their imprints. Over the years, I’ve kept it up to date by tracking news in Publishers Weekly about imprints being spun up, shut down, or reorged.
The visualization has developed quite a following, and VPs from nearly every one of the Big 5 have reached out at some point asking for edits.
A limitation of it has always been that it only shows the state of imprints as of right now. So last weekend’s project was to make that historical data accessible to everyone, and to let you search for imprints, including those that are no longer around.
Word of the week
For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing.
—Plato, Apology 22d (translated by Harold North Fowler)
Until next time.
Be well,
Ali
P.S. Some past issues to read through in case you missed them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
A lesson in and of itself about not dismissing ideas just because of where they come from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method