Relevance: Remarkable Ignorance
From The Unknowable Truth Glossary.
We encounter massive amounts of information these days—whether doomscrolling the news, watching viral videos, or keeping up with our Substack subscriptions. We know some of what we see is false or misleading. When information is important to us, we must decide whether we believe it. This can be tough.
The fundamental principle of The Unknowable Truth is that we cannot be absolutely certain of anything, and this becomes a challenge when we have to make consequential decisions. It requires us to authenticate critical facts so we can make choices with more confidence in a positive outcome. This authentication process can be exhausting, so we must be selective, scrutinizing relevant information and ignoring everything else.
Ignoring certain information to focus on more relevant facts might be described as “remarkable ignorance.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first published Sherlock Holmes story, Watson discovers that the brilliant detective doesn’t know planets revolve around the sun, so he explains the Copernican model of the solar system. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it,” Holmes says, “because it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.” Holmes suggests that a person only has so much room in their brain for knowledge and “there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.” Stocking the mind with irrelevant clutter, the detective implies, leads to “useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” Watson comments that Holmes’ “ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.”
While I’m not convinced our brains have a firm storage limit for knowledge (or that any of us get close to filling it), I do believe we have finite time and energy to devote to authenticating information and deciding what we believe. Disregarding useless information preserves these resources, allowing us to focus on facts relevant to our success. It means curating our news sources and deliberately seeking information from credible authorities rather than letting algorithms feed us. It means ignoring information that pollutes our brains with irrelevant noise.
The trick is to curate our information sources without building an echo chamber full of messages that confirm our biases. Information that challenges our beliefs IS relevant.
Pursuing The Unknowable Truth is about building a mental model of the world that allows us to make better choices—and adapting that model when we learn things that can make it more accurate. That means seeking out and entertaining any relevant information that makes our model better, whether we like it or not.