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Transcript: Knowing What You Don’t Know
[intro music]
Slide 1: Knowing What You Don't Know
Hello and welcome to PD20 Developing Reasoned Conclusions. My name is Greg Andres, and I will be with you throughout this course. I hope you will have a great work term. And I hope you learn a lot about yourself, about engineering, and what it means to develop professional skills.
Slide 2: Professional Expectations
Now apply this to your life right now. You have set out to become a professional engineer. As such, people will expect things of you. For example, consider what Section 77 of the PEO Code of Ethics says: A practitioner shall, 1. Regard the practitioner’s duty to public welfare as paramount; 2. Endeavor at all times to enhance the public regard for the practitioner’s profession by extending the public knowledge thereof and discouraging untrue, unfair or exaggerated statements with respect to professional engineering; 3. Not express publicly, or while the practitioner is serving as a witness before a court, commission or other tribunal, opinions on professional engineering matters that are not founded on adequate knowledge and honest conviction;
Slide 3: Professional Expectations
You will be held accountable for what you say. It is expected that you will be truthful. It is expected that you will know what you are talking about. And it is expected that you will have good reasons to back up your claims. This is what will be expected of you as an engineer.
Slide 4: Professional Expectations
So how do you get to the position where you are able to speak with authority, and that you can confidently assert that your conclusions are based on good evidence? What can you do now to get to where you need to be? You have taken the first important step by working on an engineering degree from UWaterloo.
Slide 5: Engineering Graduate Attributes
Now, to remain accredited, the Faculty of Engineering must comply with the requirements set out by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. The CEAB lists a number of attributes that engineering graduates are expected to have upon completing their degree. Among the attributes are investigation, communication skills, professionalism, ethics and equity and lifelong learning. There are other attributes, but I want to focus on these five for now.
Slide 6: Engineering Graduate Attributes
What can you do now to develop these 5 attributes? Practice them. Think of these attributes as practical abilities. And one of the things that you should be doing now, during your work term, is practicing these skills. This requires honest self-assessment, conscious effort, and a lot of work. Mastery doesn’t just happen. Mastery requires effort. And this is why this course is important for you. This course is designed to help you along your journey of becoming a valuable employee, and a consummate professional. This course is here to guide you as you work on your professional skills.
Slide 7: Knowing What You Don't Know
How difficult is it for you to admit you don’t know something? As much as we would like to think otherwise, we will never know everything. There will always be something else for us to learn. Acknowledging that we don’t know is important. Think of it this way: if we convince ourselves that we know everything, then there is nothing left for us to learn. However, if we have overestimated our competence and abilities, there will be things for us to learn. Which puts us in a bind: there are things for us to learn, but we are unwilling to learn them because we have convinced ourselves that we already know everything. And when this happens in the workplace, we become intolerable to our co-workers and a problem for our supervisor.
Slide 8: Knowing What You Don't Know
So we must learn to acknowledge our ignorance. There is nothing wrong with being ignorant, per se. Ignorance is simply a state of not knowing. If we are in a state of ignorance, we lack the necessary knowledge, or we do not have the relevant information. Again, ignorance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s what you do once you realize that you’re in a state of ignorance that matters. When you identify your state of ignorance and seek to correct it, you are demonstrating intellectual integrity. This brings us to a crucial distinction. It is one thing to be in a state of ignorance. It is an entirely different thing to realize that you are in a state of ignorance.
Slide 9: Knowing What You Don't Know
We can make this distinction explicit by using a Johari window. When it comes to knowledge, we either know something or we don’t know it. So going back to Mister Fowler’s story in the Ringwearer video, we either know what structural steel design tables are or we don’t. But not only can we have knowledge about things like catwalks, design tables, and engineering, we can have knowledge about knowledge. If you know something and you know that you know it, then what you have is explicit knowledge.
Slide 10: Explicit Knowledge
So what is explicit knowledge? If you have explicit knowledge about a subject, you’ll be able to articulate what you know about that subject. If you have explicit knowledge, you’ll be able to teach and explain what you know to other people. You’ll be able to answer questions and apply what you know to new contexts. And you’ll be able to state what follows as a matter of logical consequence. In short, explicit knowledge should be our goal, and it’s the type of thing that a good university education will provide you with. And the more you learn about engineering and the particular industry you find yourself in, the more valuable you’ll be to have around.
Slide 11: Ignorant, but Aware
But not only can we know that we know, we can also know that we don’t know something. In which case we are ignorant, but we are aware of our ignorance. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s simply a matter of fact.
Slide 12: Ignorant, but Aware
So for example, I don’t know how to build a toaster. Put all the parts in front of me and I will just stare at the pile. And I know that I don’t know how to build a toaster. It’s not that I am proud of my ignorance; it’s just that I’ve never had the need to learn. That’s the nice thing about having money in a free market economy. If my toaster breaks, I can pay somebody else to build one for me. Or go back to the catwalk example given by Mister Fowler. Mister Fowler knew that he didn’t know anything about structural steel design tables; of course that’s the sort of thing that you need to know if you’re going to build a catwalk, but since he knew what he didn’t know, he knew what he needed to learn to get the job done. The point is, it’s not that ignorance is a bad thing per say; it’s what you do once you realize that you’re in a state of ignorance that matters.
Slide 13: Practical Knowledge
Now this is where it gets interesting. Is it possible to not know that you know something? Now on first blush, this seems like a paradoxical question. But it makes sense if we make the distinction between explicit propositional knowledge (knowledge that you can articulate) and practical knowledge. You can know something but not know that you know it. It’s just that what you have is practical knowledge.
Slide 14: Practical Knowledge
What is practical knowledge? Well it’s an ability to do something. Like walking, riding a bike, or whistling. In some cases, you might not be able to articulate what you know. Take my late-father, for example. My father could play pretty much any song on the piano by ear. But if you put sheet music in front of him, he was completely lost. If you hummed the tune for him, he could pick it up and play it immediately. On occasion I asked him, “Dad how do you do that?” To which he always responded, “I don’t know, I just can.” People who can play the piano by ear know how to play the piano, even though they may be at a loss to explain how they do it. They just do it.
Slide 15: Practical Knowledge
In some cases, you might not even be aware that you have a particular ability. I think swimming is the most obvious example. Ask me if I know how to swim and I’ll say, I don’t know. I’ve never tried. To find out if I can swim, all you’d have to do is to get me into the pool somehow. And it’s quite likely that I have the ability to stay afloat and propel myself through the water. Swimming is a natural ability that many mammals, including humans, have. Even bats can swim. Swimming is an excellent example of having an ability but not knowing that you have the ability.
Slide 16: Ignorant but Unaware
The last quadrant represents a state where we don’t know something and we don’t know that we don’t know. In which case we are ignorant, but unaware that we are ignorant. Now in some sense, this is the state that humankind has found itself in over and over again.
Slide 17: Ignorant but Unaware
Before the invention of the telescope we did not know that there are moons orbiting Jupiter. We did not know that we didn’t know, and Galileo’s discovery fundamentally altered our view of the cosmos. People didn’t know any better before Galileo’s discovery, but now that we know that the sun is the centre of our solar system, we would have very little patience for someone who still believed that the planets revolve around the earth.
Slide 18: Ignorant but Unaware
Before Einstein, no one knew anything about relativity, and we didn’t know that we didn’t know. But thanks to Einstein’s work, we now know what relativity is (or at the very least, we know that we don’t know what it is). Before the science of genetics took form, we didn’t know that we didn’t know anything about DNA. And again, our new formed understanding has changed the way we approach the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.
Slide 19: Blindspot Bias
The point is, ignorance is not, in itself, a bad thing. What matters is how we address our ignorance. And we can easily trip ourselves up if we are not careful. Here’s one way that we can trip ourselves up. Even if we acknowledge that there will be times where we will need more information to reach a reasonable conclusion, we can quickly convince ourselves that we do not, at this moment, need more information.
Slide 20: Blindspot Bias
Here is an example. On the next page, you will see an argument. There will be two premises – two claims, and a conclusion. They will be laid out in this form:
What I want you to do is assess the argument. Is it a good argument? Is there enough information in the premises to know that the conclusion is true beyond a doubt? Read the two premises and conclusion, then click on the button you think is the correct assessment.
Slide 21: Blindspot Bias
Everything about this argument seems so right. Both premises are obviously true, as is the conclusion. Yet the premises do not give us enough information to conclude (beyond a doubt) that some roses fade.
Slide 22: Blindspot Bias
What trips us up is our conviction that some roses fade, and this conviction is no doubt informed by our past experiences. So when we are presented with the information in the premises of the argument, we don’t stop to ask ourselves if we need more information to come to the conclusion that some roses fade. The premises and conclusion fit so well with our experiences that we quickly convince ourselves that we do not, in this situation, need more information.
Slide 23: Employers
Now this is not to dismiss the value of our experiences. My point is that if we are not careful, what we think we know will affect how we interpret the information and data that we have in front of us. We have an almost limitless capacity to overlook our own ignorance, and this will hinder us in the workplace. What employers are looking for — and what will get you ahead in your professional life — is the ability to recognize that you are in a state of ignorance, a willingness to admit that you don’t know, and a corresponding readiness to do the work to learn what you need to learn to do your job better. In other words, employers want workers with intellectual integrity.