On not knowing what I know
It's taken me decades and a reckoning with how much in the world is fundamentally unknowable before I could finally begin to trust my instincts and develop my intuition.
Some months ago, a friend of mine's therapist showed her a chart that outlined four developmental levels, telling my friend she was at the second:
You know what you know.
You know what you don’t know.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
You don’t know what you know.
I reported this to my own therapist—who affirmed she had seen the same patterns—because, at the time, I was grappling pretty intensely with level four. I still am, just less intensely. On seeing the chart I realized I could point to where in my life I started thinking about each of levels two through four:
The second level came in late high school and undergrad, as I started to realize just how little I knew—or would ever know—about the topics that interested me. I continued to think about things in this fashion until …
Late 2018, when I learned about the story around dietary science in the US, and it shook my worldview its foundations. Events, experiences, and books I read in 2019-continued to rattle me further, and by early 2022, my old view of the world and my place in it was completed shattered. By this point, it was clear to me that there were so many things that I not only didn’t know but didn’t know I didn’t know them that my old approaches to problem-solving felt meaningless. I had no idea how to proceed, but I looked for answers in books, and I was fortunately to have friends, mentors, and my father to help guide me as well.
And then, in April 2022, my father died unexpectedly. As I looked through his house and realized how he’d lived his best life, suddenly I realized that I had a lot of the tools to pursue my own best life, if only I could find the strength to trust my own judgment and the courage to pursue it. I flirted with that from August 2022 onwards, but it wasn’t until late 2023 that I began actively and consistently listening to my own intuitions and testing them, even when the going was hard.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books played crucial roles in transitions #2 & #3. I read his book The Black Swan because the covid pandemic had people talking about it again, which is something that might merit a post all of its own. And then when I read Antifragile, it was like after years of falling apart, things started falling together. It was like I had found the legendary library index from Borges’ infinite “Library of Babel”: I started seeing how things I already knew fit together, I started understanding where and how to look for the pieces of the puzzle that were still missing.
One of the missing pieces was the idea of “levels of thinking” itself—especially the correlation of the four levels I opened with with the more detailed system of spiral dynamics—but I’m realizing that’s yet another saga for another post. For now it's sufficient to say that the levels I opened with seem to lineup pretty well with pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional, and what spiral dynamics calls ‘second-order’ thinking.
Second-order thinking is hard to explain to people who aren’t at least grasping at it, but once you understand it it’s everywhere. I see these stages explicitly described in the Dao De Jing, and in Al-Ghazali’s account of how he became a Sufi. I see it in Nietzsche, in Chesterton, in Hayek. I see it in the works of Kahlil Gibran, Jorge Luis Borges, and Paulo Coelho. I see it in the works of the anthropologists James C. Scott and David Graeber. I see it across a host of physicists who have sometimes been accused of “quantum mysticism,” such as Bohm, Lazlo, Capra. I see it in certain self-help/entrepreneurship books such as Essentialism, The Unfair Advantage, and 10X is Easier than 2X.
The second-order thinking of spiral dynamics is not defined only by the idea that you don't know what you know: that comes only after you’ve started learning to apply it. Donella Meadows’ seminal book Thinking in Systems springs to mind as a good example of second-order thinking that seems to precede explicit acknowledgement the recognition of “not knowing what you know.” Indeed, from a spiral dynamics account: recognizing that you don’t know what you known and learning to act on that realization effectively seems to be one of the features distinguishing “yellow” from “turquoise.”
In that respect, the period between the end of 2023 and early 2025 has been a sea change for me: a series of revelations that I either knew what I needed to solve various problems at work in my life or knew where and how to find the answers. It's been a period where I've learned that many skills I take for granted—especially soft skills—are actually rare and valuable. I feel incredibly fortunate that by the time I was laid off from Chevron, I had identified—often my coworkers had identified—a series of skills that will serve me well if I can choose projects and roles that let me play to them. Some highlights, in roughly chronological order:
As a writer, I’m above average, but as a reader I’m in a league almost of my own.
I have a genuine interest in foreign cultures and connect well with foreigners.
I’m a technically-knowledgable person with an inclination to people-oriented work.
I have an exceptional ability for pattern recognition and anomaly detection in situations that are still too messy for AI.
I have an understanding of issues surrounding AI—especially the history of its development—that make me neither an optimist nor a pessimist but a realist. Not only can I say—given the opportunity to ask the right questions—when Generative AI is or is not a good solution to a problem, I can often propose low-tech or non-technical solutions when they would be better.
I can “translate” between business users and technical people, or different technical roles within the data science & analytics space.
In my quest to understand things, I’m not afraid to ask questions or propose hypotheses that might make me look like an idiot.
There's probably more I’m not recalling—and definitely more I haven’t discovered—but I think this list gives the general picture. The crucial thing though is that a lot of these are things that I had kind of recognized and grasped at but not dared to pursue because I mostly didn’t think of them as qualifications until people who knew and worked with me told me so. The crucial lesson of recognizing that I “don't know what I know” is to trust my gut enough to test things. Not just that: it means trusting my gut about which ideas are worth testing and which are not.