When you are in the dark, you can see the stars

January 21st, 2010

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I would be highly surprised if I had any new information to add to the Internet.

But therein lies the principle of this entry. What if the point of this entry was to encourage others to subtract from their ever-expanding body of knowledge?

Why is the acquisition of information perceived as the noble route of the person in the “information age”? Speaking entirely from the anecdotal experience, there seems to have been a loss of the classical fear of knowledge. Back when I was a kid, when we heard about the often-cursed La Cueva del Diablo (Devil’s Cave), we did not rush with lamps and Harry Potter outfits. No sireee. We stayed away.

Today, if people found a real-life version of the Necronomicon, they would probably read out loud whatever spells are written on the margins for the world to watch on YouTube.

So keeping in mind that I generally think learning is good (I, too, appreciate doctors having gone to medical school), I would like to make this short defense on the careful eschewing of knowledge.

Choosing what we should NOT know is a skill which seems to be out of fashion in an age where reading is universally touted as “a win.” In fact, the art of Careful Ignorance seems to have been relegated to the fields of personal tragedy/awful things (“It would be uncomfortable to know…”) or scientific data snooping (“If I know who has the placebo, it ruins the experiment…”).

But there are so many other forms and reasons to turn off a few more bulbs and keep one more in the dark. There are so many things to learn in the dark…

For example, a few years ago, my friends and I were playing the web-based game “Fantasy Moguls” where people would a certain number of movies and whomever had the movies with the most box office wins. That game meant one had to pick which movies one expected to be the “winners” or “blockbusters.” I was (and still am) in Los Angeles, while one of my rivals was in Boston. Despite everyone around me constantly talking about movies (I go to the movies almost every week), I found that Judd was consistently picking better winners.

So I “hit the books.” I read Variety every day, saw the numbers, even ran a regression or two all in a vain effort to beat him. When I finally asked him how he picked his movies he said, that if he saw it ads for it (in Boston) then he thought I would reach a general audience. Alas, in Los Angeles I was surrounded by every movie, every detail while the distance in Boston actually helped cull some of that noise. Too much information is not a new problem, it becomes an increasingly larger problem as we digest more information, and we dare not risk not “being out of the loop.” In my eternal quest to complicate my life and create entropy, I have experimented with various ways of dealing with a need for knowledge and better way of culling said knowledge. Yes, I could rely on “critical analysis” and things like that, but where is the fun in that?

Diego

Tagged with: Knowledge, Ignorance

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