How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know

hex0D passes along an article at NPR about a study that examined the biology behind the self-assessment of knowledge. Quoting: "We isolated a region of the prefrontal cortex, which is right at the front of the brain and is thought to be involved in high-level thought, conscious planning, monitoring of our ongoing brain activity,' Fleming says. In people who were good at assessing their own level of certainty, that region had more gray matter and more connections to other parts of the brain, according to the study Fleming and his colleagues published in the journal Science."

Mostly, it doesn't

[flaming error]

In The Science of Fear (a book I heartily recommend), Daniel Gardner claims the strength of our "feeling of knowing" generally has no statistically significant correlation with factual reality. Humans are not very good at "knowing." and our most cherished concepts of "truth" may be unverifiable or demonstrably false.

Which is why, paradox intended, a person who knows he knows nothing is wise.

Re:Mostly, it doesn't

[hedwards]

Precisely, I've found that I know far more than I think I know, and it isn't until later on that the knowledge is proved or disproved that I have any idea as to what I really know.

It's odd sometimes how gut feeling and instinct end up being correct.

Re:What you don't know

[Philotic]

"In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian unconscious. If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns", the threats from Saddam we did not even suspect, the Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the main dangers actually are 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. To unearth these "unknown knowns" is the task of an intellectual."

-Slavoj Zizek
http://www.lacan.com/zizekempty.htm [lacan.com]

Re:Oh dear..

[catmistake]

I'm going with Plato on this one... easier to swallow: we already knew everything, we just forgot, and we 'learn' by being reminded of what we already know (knew).

Re:What you don't know

[ZorroXXX]

Also expressed as Orders of Ignorance by Phillip G. Armour in "The Laws of Software Process":

• 0OI - Lack of Ignorance. You know something.
• 1OI - Lack of Knowledge. You know that you do not know something.
• 2OI - Lack of Awareness. You do not know that you do not know something.

Re:I guess it all boils down to distance

[macraig]

EMOTIONAL detachment is part of the key. Emotions are a dangerous input to allow in the decision-making process. Sadly as a species we are wired to allow exactly that, excepting those blessed with specific neural damage or mutations.

Re:relation to politics

[jd]

We are indeed pack animals, and packs do not exhibit total individual freedom. Rather, they balance individual freedom with societal freedom and governmental freedom (the sum total of which is the same for all societies, no matter what the form). I do not pretend to know where in this three-way division the ideal balance should be, but I am absolutely certain that political evolution must involve changing those values. Holding them fixed, regardless of what they are fixed to, is a Bad Idea. Holding any of the three above a certain threshold has never, historically, been so great either. Somalia has total individual freedom, France has total societal freedom and Iran has total governmental freedom - all three are complete disasters.

Now, you're all completely safe as I'm totally unelectable anywhere on the planet, but if I were to be able to wave my hands and impose some bounds, I'd probably start by splitting freedom in a 4:4:2 ratio, giving equal rights to society and to the individual, with government mostly ensuring that neither abused the system to deprive the other of those rights. My underlying principle is that a balanced system is free to evolve, an unbalanced one will forever fight itself and have no time left over to evolve.

So why do I sneer at individual freedom if I make it such a big part of this concept? It isn't individual freedom I have a problem with, it's absolute freedom I have a problem with. Once any of the three divisions has all the degrees of freedom for itself, the other two automatically have nothing left for themselves. I don't care which division that is. I'd have said the same thing replacing individual freedom with any other type of freedom in any other discussion that covered the freedom of something else. One-sided freedom isn't free. Indeed, this isn't even one-sided - you need two points to make a side and absolute freedom only has one.

Ideally, you'd have far more points than the three I've listed, but three is an easy number to work with on a posting. You can extend the concept as much as you like in your mind, where the only restrictions my idea places on the concept are that no parameter is set to 0, interdependencies should start balanced and regulating dependencies should be capable of regulating but never supplanting.