The Invisible Shore

The hardest thing to take into account is not what we do not know but what we do not suspect exists.

A person sees the boundary of his own knowledge only in part. Beyond it lies not emptiness but a vast number of concepts, methods and experiences for which he does not yet even have names.

Because of this, a superficial acquaintance sometimes produces more confidence than a deep one. A beginner sees a few rules and considers the problem understood. A specialist sees exceptions, competing models, the quality of the data, and a dozen ways it can all go wrong.

It does not follow that the specialist is always right and the newcomer should keep quiet. A newcomer can notice a question that professional habit has stopped seeing. But it helps to distinguish a fresh view from confidence handed over free of charge along with a lack of information.

Other people are especially valuable because they notice things we have no internal instrument for. Someone from another profession, culture or life can see a constraint that is not obvious. Not because every other point of view is true, but because one’s own is inevitably incomplete.

Theories of superiority usually start from a convenient error: everything important we cannot see in another person is declared absent.

Intellectual modesty does not require thinking yourself stupid. It requires leaving room in the model for the unknown.

Sometimes the most accurate phrase is not “I know” but:

As far as I understand it now.

The size of the invisible can only be measured with someone else’s hands. A man buys a flat, reads the contract and understands it all: the sum, the deadlines, the penalties. A lawyer looks at it for ten minutes and asks about the consent of the seller’s spouse, about a conversion not shown on the plan, and about who was deregistered from the flat before the sale and under what circumstances. Not one of these questions had occurred to the buyer: in his picture of the world such fields simply do not exist.

So the question “have I taken everything into account?” is useless — it is answered by the same head that drew up the list. Only someone else’s list works: from another profession, another kind of experience, or at least another bad case.