“I Dont Know”
A Short Essay on Knowledge, Written in Sep 2020 in the context of mechanical engineering and lightly edited in late 2024
“I Dont Know”
Do you remember the last time you used that phrase? But not for some bit of trivial knowledge, a friend asking what time it is, or a fact far outside your expertise and interest. No, for something more substantial, and more so, to oneself. What do we even mean by it? Not knowing what?
It’s a bit of an ironic phrase - as how do you know that you don’t know? Or to what extent?
It is important to remember though, since “I don’t know” is the only real starting point to, well, anything, especially in the sciences that engineering is built on. Being able to say it, and stay with it for a while, is necessary - rather than brushing it off. Being in the not knowing state, and trying to bound a box around it: “now this, I do know, and that, I know where to learn since I heard the term in X class…, so really, it’s only Y, that I have absolutely no clue how big it is, how to approach it…what it even is related to…”.
In this way not knowing can be made explicit, bounded, contained.1
It is that state where you can either go the right way, or the wrong one. Or at the very least waste a bunch of time. While being in that state, you might realize that most people can’t stand it - to be in the not knowing state, and so rush to escape it to the first available exit - escaping to the familiar. And so whatever you learned in school becomes an immediate, instinctual fallback, rather than a calculated choice.
What do I mean? To escape uncertainty, we have a habit of classifying . Giving things a label (or a story, an ideology) - “good”, “bad”, “enemy” “friend” - it is a product of modernity, and has been quite useful - but can backfire. It’s no coincidence that scientific terms and chemical ingredients on food packaging, have become so commonplace. It’s just easier for us to process, when everything is categorized. But, the exact same object can exist under different labels, depending on who is using it and for what. Water becomes H₂O, a few lines of graphite on paper become a diagram.
This tendency to classify is important, since a wrong interpretation of facts can lead to disaster. The unit m could be meters, or minutes. N/m² can be pressure, or stress. A force can be an input, or an output. Vibration can be inconsequential, or it can cause catastrophe. A soldier carrying a white flag can be a trap, or a signal of surrender. It’s a matter of interpretation of the situation - classifying, labeling.
It is crucial then, to stay a while in the state of not knowing. So that every step towards knowing - classifying - is done consciously, and in some cases, you might realize that in the act of classifying, you suddenly have another unknown area come up, a side effect of classifying. Or maybe you realize that you lack the skill, or have to go in a few directions before finding out which is the right one. In a sense, the act of building knowledge is not of fitting to what you find familiar, but a splitting into parts, and piecing it back together from there.
May the truth never be set aside in favor of the convenient known, and may we be alert enough to tell them apart. In a sense, our mind might be playing a “cup trick” on us - when we look away, the substitution occurs.
Though, this doesn’t fix overconfidence. But theres other ways to improve that. For example, “calibration practice” (and here), or somewhat structured reflection on past decisions.