Estou de acordo com a afirmação em epígrafe - ainda hoje aconselhava uma jovem universitária: "aprofunda o conhecimento da tua ignorância". Já reservo a minha opinião - são necessárias mais leituras e reflexão - sobre as implicações que se retiram do que se segue no resto da nota (parte não transcrita: tem a ver com questões relacionadas com a ajuda ao desenvolvimento):
"Suppose you needed to get from New York to Washington for a personal emergency. An airline told you that the projected time of departure for your one-hour flight was 2pm this afternoon. Of course, there is some uncertainty about this. The unstated promise of the airline is that this uncertainty will be kept within familiar bounds, with delays up to an hour not unusual, and delays of several hours possible with unexpected weather or mechanical failure. But suppose the airline secretly knew that due to a large set of unreliable links in the chain like a flight attendants’ union that might strike, a large risk of major engine failures throughout its fleet, and problems with the mechanics’ union that might prevent repairs, that the possible delays were not in HOURS, but in DAYS. You would be angry at the airline for not telling you this, and once you knew how much they didn’t know, you would quickly drop the airline and take the train instead.
The moral of the story is that knowing how much uncertainty there is about a projection – that is, knowing how much the projector DOESN’T KNOW – is often more important than the projection. An “estimated departure time based on the best available information” is meaningless to an airline customer if the uncertainty is about DAYS rather than HOURS.
Not knowing that you don’t know is at the root of many recent disasters, starting with the crisis itself. Holders of opaque derivatives apparently didn’t know how leveraged and exposed they were to shocks like falling housing prices, nor did they know how uncertain the housing prices were. Outside of economics, not knowing what we didn’t know is one of many causes for bad outcomes in Iraq and Afgha"
A complacência, o pecado mortal do século XXI, segundo um editorial antigo do Economist, filia-se neste tipo de ignorância.
Tirado de The Perils of Not Knowing that You Don’t Know -AID WATCH
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