Guild Pain Point #6 — Ignorance
Pervasive, oftentimes willful, and it has deep seeds, which makes it one to the toughest to overcome
Author: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures
“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.” — Marcus Aurelius
Grey Swan Guild’s Seven Pain Points for Making Better Sense of the World
These are the seven things that confront our mission. We obsess about them. We strive to overcome them. We seek to navigate around them. We hunger to alleviate the bad consequences of them. They are pain points.
We are profiling our sixth one here — it is pervasive, oftentimes willful, and it has deep seeds (which makes it one to the toughest to overcome), it’s the pain point of Ignorance.
VI. Ignorance
Once a person stops searching for information and self-knowledge, ignorance usually sets in. In becoming a multidisciplinary “a fifth place” , one of our Grey Swan Guild’s roles is to de-weed the roots and stems of ignorance by attracting the individually smart and a diverse range of intellects and then challenge members’ world views. Occasionally these members feel stronger about their ingoing views after, other times they are changed. Nearly every time however, provocation and the act of making sense happens.
Unfortunately in this modern super-connected world full of braggadocio , the Dunning-Kruger effect reigns free. The dictionary definition for DKE is “a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities”. Perhaps said better than our dictionary is American author Charles Bukowski remorseful opine “the problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence (and volume).”
Anybody suggesting ignorance is bliss might be guilty of their own wayward assertion. The very roots of our Guild was started by attempting to root out ignorance in the early days of the pandemic back in 2020. We have tackled other contentious debates that tend to attract ignorance, deliberate and otherwise — gun control, cancel culture, misinformation/disinformation, climate change, wars & conflict, financial hysteria, technology hype and inequality. With key events, we attempt to frame questions that do not land on one side of arguments so squarely. With our intelligence, we cover off multiple frames of reference. With community, we impart no preference for left or right, female or male, young or old, members — all our welcome and have a safe place to express well-reasoned views here.
Facets of our Pain Point Ignorance:
Agnotology is the study (and practice) of how ignorance and doubt is spread in society. Many think tanks, operate with a painful disregard for truths backed by questionable funding, offering more misanthropic edge views than proofs, while casting more doubt and confusion among its followers. They are charlatans of knowledge. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but one not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance, or a one-quarter as bad as intentionally sewing obfuscation and “alternative facts”. Our Guild detests them. Instead, we try to overcome the worst parts of ignorance:
- Poor Education: Insufficient access to quality education through socioeconomic barriers, educational infrastructure, and lack of resources.
- Misinformation/Disinformation/Toxinformation: Spread of false or misleading information through deliberate dissemination of falsehoods, incorrect interpretation of evidence, and poor media literacy.
- Willful Ignorance: Intentionally avoiding disclosure and acknowledgement of information about the negative consequences of actions, for identity-based motives, selfish vested interests or other individual and social group reasons.
- Power Politics: Ignorance influenced by positional, traditional or charismatic authority, caused by knowledge hiding, strategic leverage and opinion coercion.
- Polarization: Strong non-rational division or conflict that forms between groups marked by the clustering and radicalization of beliefs at two distant and antagonistic poles, based on ideology, emotion and mass suasion.
- Emotional Frenzy: Emotional states affecting perception and learning caused by heightened fears, anxieties, and over-exhuberance that shut out open-mindedness and curiosity.
- Intellectual Apathy: Unwillingness to exert cognitive energy due to a preference for convenient, quick answers, apathy towards learning, and resistance to changing beliefs.
- Critical Thinking Gaps: Inability to analyze and evaluate information effectively via poor educational tools, inadequate training in logic and reasoning, and selective perception.
- Philosophical Ignorance: Lack of understanding of philosophical concepts and ethical principles by a neglect of a humanities focus, superficial engagement with deep questions, and moral relativism.
- Technological Illiteracy: Inability and fear of effectively using technology based on not staying abreast of advancements, conscious avoidance, lack of access, and generational gaps.
- Time-based Amnesia and Stasis: Ignorance of, or simplification of historical events and contexts, and/or ability to imagine a range of different tomorrows than current.
The Guild’s Response to Ignorance
The Guild tries to tackle ignorance head on by surfacing evidence, that goes beyond mere opinion or blind hope. Sometimes this needs to be rooted out from some of the smartest people and top experts (due to the curse of knowledge and experience). Frequently, we call it a failure to learn, relearn and unlearn, and it can be most virulent among established professionals. Specifically, we do this through:
- Experiences — 1,000 Day Radar: unlike many other future-oriented groups, we strive to present a range of uncertain, semi-certain and certain viewpoints and horizons (the #Fs of forecasts, foresights and futures) recognizing the value each have in minimizing the surprise of our tomorrows and allowing us to operate more optimally in the now.
- Intelligence — a Library of Reports and Outputs: we make the majority of our outputs and report toplines available to the world at large by Creative Commons free copyright licensing.
- Community — Member Recruitment: Within member recruitment drives, we are intentional in attempting to recruit a balance of genders, disciplines and geographies to have our Guild provide mosaic, no echo-chamber views of the world.
- Ventures -Real Time Uncertainty Monitor: we are working on a platform that seeks to understand the root causes of uncertainty more comprehensively and objectively, in addition to including the anxiety and emotional components of uncertainty on why collectively we feel certain ways.
Read up on the other Pain Point posts
Pain Points for Making Sense of the World Overview :
Uncertainty — Guild Pain Point #1
Bias & Noise — Guild Pain Point #2 :
Negativity — Guild Pain Point #3
Superficiality — Guild Pain Point #4
Silo Mentality — Guild Pain Point #5
Grey Swan Guild — the Calls to Action
If you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and our particular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.
First, join our Grey Swan Guild LinkedIn page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.
Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.
If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.
Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is the form.
Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in August. Here’s the link.
