Sure, Knowledge Is Power, but Ignorance Is Underrated

We crave knowledge. Only ostriches stick their heads in the sand. Right? Well, then, how can we explain the following?

“Don’t tell me how the movie ends.”

“Don’t tell me if I have the gene for that disease.”

“Don’t tell me my startup is likely to fail.”

“Don’t tell me if my spouse cheated on me.”

“Don’t tell me how they slaughter veal calves.”

In many cases, let’s face it, we prefer not to know things, contrary to simple economic theories that say more information is always better. We tell one another that ignorance is bliss. We reject too much information.

We even structure our societies to exclude knowledge for certain purposes. Courts have inadmissible evidence. Employers have inadmissible questions for applicants. For 17 years, the military’s policy on homosexuality was “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” More recently, many colleges stopped asking for SAT and ACT scores, although some have started asking for them again.

This week I read a book on the topic, “Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know.” Published in paperback in 2021, it’s a compilation of scholarly articles edited by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel. Engel is a specialist in law and economics at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany, and Hertwig, a psychologist, is an expert on adaptive rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Deliberate ignorance “is an underrated mental tool,” the editors write in their introduction. They write, with intended irony, that psychological science “has erred in choosing to remain largely ignorant on the topic of deliberate ignorance.”

Deliberate ignorance can be useful, as in paring away mental clutter, or harmless, as in the example of not wanting a movie spoiled. Orchestras started hiring more women after musicians went behind a screen during auditions so their gender was undetectable. But deliberate ignorance can also be bad — for example, if someone has H.I.V., chooses not to be tested and transmits the virus to someone else.

I thought about deliberate ignorance when I read about a recent Harris Poll for The Guardian, which found that last month 49 percent of Americans believed the S&P 500 stock market index was down for the year (at the time it was up 9 percent since the start of the year), and the same percentage believed that the unemployment rate was at a 50-year high, when in fact unemployment was not far above a 50-year low.

This can’t be chalked up to simple error. Believing things that are so far away from the truth is evidence that many Americans have constructed their own realities and pushed away facts that don’t fit. For some, it may be a mental defense mechanism: I’m not happy, but we’re all in the same boat.

But rejecting plain reality can also be an offense mechanism, as we saw when supporters of Donald Trump invaded the Capitol in 2021 to stop the certification of the election. It didn’t help that Trump had repeatedly insisted that traditional sources of information could not be trusted: “Just remember,” he once said, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

In a game of chicken between negotiating parties, the player who doesn’t know how bad things might turn out will always win against the player who is fully aware. Ignorance looks a lot like courage. “Ignorance Is Strength” was one of Big Brother’s slogans in the dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

In an interview, Hertwig told me that choosing one source of news while scanting others is itself an act of deliberate ignorance. “We have entered a new world in which the natural tendencies are interacting with an information environment that amplifies the effects,” he said.

“Deliberate Ignorance” is not primarily a political book. Many of its most interesting examples come from other spheres. In personal finance, investors are wise to blind themselves to the daily ups and downs of their portfolios’ performance if that keeps them from overtrading.

In business, one chapter argues that companies compartmentalize information — that is, deliberately keep employees ignorant — to lessen the risk that the company as a whole will be held liable for individuals’ malfeasance. Or during a strike, labor union leaders might skip meeting with the rank and file — thus depriving themselves of knowledge of the workers’ preferences — to send a message to management that they’re not wavering.

Here’s another business example: A company vows that it will never inquire as to the causes of poor performance by a supplier. “Ignorance in this case credibly commits the principal to not accepting excuses, even if they are good.” Knowing this will cause the supplier to up its game. “These arm’s length relationships may be beneficial as they create better incentives and raise overall production,” the chapter authors write.

In our interview, Hertwig brought up artificial intelligence, which is “data hungry” in the computer vernacular. If you tell it to ignore race, it will fall back on postal code, which is often a good proxy for race. There is no simple way to make A.I. ignorant, Hertwig said. One, though, is to use “fast and frugal” algorithms that clearly don’t draw on forbidden information, rather than “black box” algorithms whose workings can’t be explained.

“We believe that the study of deliberate ignorance may become a new scientific career of great importance,” Hertwig and Engel write. I hope they’re right. If they’re wrong, I don’t want to know.

The Readers Write

There will always be famine somewhere, and the humanitarian crises are so overwhelming that they will always soak up every dollar I can ever send. Do I think of a contribution to an art museum as a luxury like eating dinner out, not as the percentage I set aside for philanthropy? If everyone followed effective altruism, would we even have museums?

Dena Davis
Manhattan

Effective altruism stands for the virtue of defining the good as carefully as you can and being open to being wrong, changing your mind and following earnest arguments where they lead. A quick survey of GiveWell’s charity reports will show you just how much trepidation E.A.s have even in their strongest endorsements. The critics in your piece seem to be mostly interested in scoring cheap points, from the ludicrous (anomalous reports of improper fishing outweigh saving children’s lives) to the unfalsifiable. They say E.A. is neo-colonialist even though giving directly to the world’s poorest people is a top choice for many E.A.s. It’s also a benchmark for assessing other interventions.

Matt Reardon
London
The writer is a manager at 80,000 Hours, an effective altruism organization.

The impact of housing costs on well-being probably needs its own separate metric, especially because it is a “dual use” expense — for some all speculative, for some an expense as compulsory as food yet sadly unaffordable.

Let the professionals work that all out and make the result a component of a revised Misery Index that will inform policymakers better about the effect of their choices on consumers.

William Wescott
Tbilisi, Georgia

Quote of the Day

“Most generally, noise makes it very difficult to test either practical or academic theories about the way that financial or economic markets work. We are forced to act largely in the dark.”

— Fischer Black, “Noise” (1986)