Unknown Unknowns

This video discusses the concept of “unknown unknowns” – limitations you don’t know you have or challenges you can’t foresee – and offers strategies for dealing with them effectively in life and work.

[00:00] The concept of unknown unknowns is introduced, often learned early in life through ambitious projects where unforeseen problems arise.
[01:10] Being aware of unknown unknowns is a powerful cognitive tool for better planning, timelines, risk assessment, and structuring efforts, recognizing that not everything can be fully modeled or predicted.

Strategies for Dealing with Uncertainty
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[01:58] Preparation and Contingency: While impossible to have a plan for everything (like Batman), having generic contingency plans and reactions is useful.
[03:00] Categorization and Triage: Triage potential issues into categories and engineer generic responses based on these classifications (like handling different hurricane categories).
[04:10] Exploration and Sidecar Projects: Dedicate time to exploration or have sidecar projects that are exploratory in nature within your domain. This includes browsing new research, reading, and identifying potential novel impacts on your current work.
[06:20] Understanding uncertainty and unknown unknowns encourages a more peaceful life and helps handle unexpected setbacks or being “derailed” better.
[07:05] While the future can’t be predicted precisely, you can understand its generic probabilistic distribution and focus on picking up the signal rather than the noise.

Building Cognitive Infrastructure
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[08:30] Naming Abstractions: Create a language or terminology around unknown unknowns to help categorize them and develop frameworks for dealing with them in the moment.
[09:50] Engineering Your Psyche: Develop a generic, extractable cognitive infrastructure – a flexible set of tools and tactics applicable in various situations.

The Power of Stories and Shared Context
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[10:40] Using Analogies from Fiction: Leverage fictional universes (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings), video games, or stories (movies, books) to create analogies and categorize unknown unknowns when they arise.
[18:00] Stories serve as a super dense encoding for conveying strategies, states of mind, and context quickly and enjoyably to others.
[21:55] Shared Story Consumption: If working in a team or organization, sharing common stories creates a mutual language or symbolic index for rapid communication and synchronization of strategies when encountering new issues.
[24:30] Music and other cultural elements (concerts, movies) also act as forms of dense encoding, helping to align or synchronize collective human minds towards ideas or moods.
[28:00] This shared context allows you to trigger specific associations or strategies in others rapidly, effectively orchestrating the “global cognitive infrastructure” with simple references.

The Final Strategy: Humility and Experience
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[30:40] Know Your Limit: Don’t overestimate what you can realistically do. Ambitious failures teach humility and the limits of prediction.
[32:10] Value Experience: Gain experience and learn intuitively from failures. Some necessary skills for dealing with unknown unknowns are not fully conveyable through theory but are learned through practice and failure.
[33:40] Build Better Languages (Jargon): Continue to build and refine your personal language or use jargon to quickly encode and convey complex concepts or experiences.