{"id":4580,"date":"2019-11-30T00:13:52","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T04:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=4580"},"modified":"2022-03-11T16:30:06","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T20:30:06","slug":"unknown-unknowns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/unknown-unknowns\/","title":{"rendered":"Unknown Unknowns: Things You Don\u2019t Know You Don\u2019t Know"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What are “unknown unknowns.” Why do we have the tendency to avoid them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll cover why unknown unknowns are so hard to see (we don’t know that we do don’t know them!) and how our tendency to “tunnel” gives us an inaccurate picture of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Our Tendency to Tunnel and Avoid <\/strong>“Unknown Unknowns”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A repercussion of the Distortion of Silent Evidence<\/a>, \u201ctunneling\u201d describes the natural human tendency to favor knowns <\/em>and known unknowns<\/em> rather than unknown unknowns<\/em>. In other words, our understanding of uncertainty is based almost exclusively on what <\/strong>has happened<\/em><\/strong> in the past rather than what <\/strong>could have happened<\/em><\/strong>.
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The primary practitioners of tunneling are those Taleb<\/a> calls \u201cnerds\u201d\u2014academics, mathematicians, engineers, statisticians, and the like. Nerds are those who think entirely \u201cinside the box\u201d; they Platonify the world and can\u2019t perceive possibilities that lie outside their scientific models and academic training. They’re especially vulnerable to missing the unknown unknowns.
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Nerds suffer from the \u201cludic fallacy.\u201d (\u201cLudic\u201d comes from the Latin word ludus<\/em>, which means \u201cgame.\u201d) That is, they treat uncertainty in real life like uncertainty in games of chance, for example roulette or blackjack. The problem with this approach is that, unlike games of chance, real life has no rules<\/em><\/strong>. Real life has far more unknown unknowns.
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Nerds aren\u2019t the only ones guilty of the ludic fallacy<\/a>, however; average people indulge it as well. For example, most people think casino games represent the height of risk and uncertainty. In truth, casino games hail from Mediocristan\u2014there are clear and definite rules that govern play, and the odds of winning or losing are calculable. Unlike real life, the amount of uncertainty in a casino game is highly constrained<\/strong>.
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The incredible unpredictability of real life and the prevalence of unknown unknowns can be illustrated by a look at casinos themselves, rather than their games. Casinos spend huge sums of money on sophisticated security systems\u2014cameras, dealer training, alarms\u2014in an effort to prevent cheating. These systems are designed to foil cheats who use methods that are either known or expected. But the casino Taleb studied suffered its worst losses not from cheating but from completely unexpected real-life events:
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