 Some banks in Switzerland offer total anonymity for their customers, and will even deny that they know who those customers are. I guess that ignorance is Swiss. So if you're watching a YouTube show called Thunk, it's probably a pretty safe bet that you value knowing things. Knowledge is power. That's why we evolved this thing and not, like, laser eyeblasts. By understanding the universe and how it works, human beings are able to harness its operating principles in truly staggering ways. I've maintained that truth is only valuable because of what you can do with it. However, some people believe that truth and knowledge are valuable in and of themselves, that given a choice between knowing and not knowing, you should always choose to know. Now, I'm not going to say that being dumb is better than being smart. Although that is a very interesting question, and I'm sure that I'll talk about it at some point in the future. However, I see some clear problems with saying that it's always better to know. I mean, just superficially, there's trivia, knowledge that is, by definition, without practical application. I think that even the most staunch advocates of learning for its own sake have to admit that what you choose to learn is just as important as the learning itself. Of course, trivia is harmless and people enjoy it, but I think that there are three cases in which it's pretty inarguably better to not know. First, knowledge shapes people's behavior, and sometimes you'll get better results behaving ignorantly than you would if you knew exactly what was going on. The most obvious example of this is the double-blind experimental setup in scientific research. In order to make sure that nobody's expectations are skewering results, it's better for both the researchers and the subjects to be ignorant of who's getting real medication and who's getting sugar pills. You might argue that double-blind studies are temporary ignorance for the sake of greater understanding, or that it's the change in behavior that's the problem, not the knowing. But the fact remains that if you're rock climbing, it still might be a very bad idea to look down. Second, knowledge shapes perception, which can actually make your life worse. The sort of Damocles is sort of the classic metaphor for this, that it's much harder to have a good time when you're facing your impending doom. That's why there's a lot of debate in medicine about whether or not doctors should inform their patients of uncurable terminal illnesses. You might do any number of things with that data, but it's inevitably going to cast certain life events in a substantially different light. But there are more pedestrian examples, too. Knowing exactly what hot dogs are made out of, and exactly how they're made, might just make that summer barbecue a little bit less delicious and a little bit more nauseating. Third, sometimes the fewer people that know something, the better. Information about pre-release movie spoilers or cutting-edge corporate research is frequently on a need-to-know basis. Not because it would be horrendous if somebody who wasn't directly involved knew some more about it, but because the more people who do have that information, the harder it is for everybody to keep it a surprise. Of course, we can keep a secret, so it's not like we shouldn't know what's going on behind closed doors. And even if we did blab, it's not like John knowing that we're throwing him a surprise birthday party is the end of the world. If you're watching, sorry, John. Happy birthday. But what about information that's legitimately dangerous? Military operations frequently require a degree of secrecy to be effective and to keep the soldiers involved safe. Would you really want people's lives dependent on your ability not to say anything after a couple of drinks? Or even scarier, what about something potentially apocalyptic? Some researchers at the University of Wisconsin in the Erasmus Medical Center figured out how to engineer a strain of H5N1 virus, a super virulent disease with a greater than 50% mortality rate to be transmitted to mammals, like humans. They were about to publish a paper detailing their experimental methodology when the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepped in and said, hmm, maybe it would be better if people didn't know how to make this stuff. Of course, it's a good thing that researchers know about this dangerous potential for the disease, because it's not like evolution is going to wait around for us to be ready. But it's a point well taken that there are technologies and information that would be nothing but disastrous in the wrong hands, and that it might be better for everybody if very few people or even zero people knew about them. So it's clear that there are situations where not knowing certain things is preferable to knowing them, that someone's life might be better, happier, or longer in exchange for a little ignorance. But there's a problem with this idea of mindfully choosing what to learn, a sort of inherent paradox. In order for us to figure out whether we would be better or worse off knowing something, somebody's got to learn it. We might be able to see the approximate shape of what lies beyond the barrier of our ignorance, but more often than not, there are important details that we can't know until we've broken through it for better or worse. And it's simply not practical to refuse to learn anything until checking to see if the people who know it are better off on average than the people who don't. Hey, Beth, you took that class on Chinese history in college, right? Great. Would you say that you feel fulfilled and self-actualized in your decisions in life? I was thinking of reading this Wikipedia article... Hello? It's possible that, with advances in neuroscience, we'll eventually have access to a machine, like in paycheck or eternal sunshine for the spotless mind, that will allow us to unlearn things that we don't want in our brains. But until then, the balance of probability is overwhelmingly in favor of knowing things being beneficial. Knowledge really is power. And speaking as an engineer, most of the time, more power is better. Do you know anything that you wish you didn't? When is it okay to tell somebody something that might hurt them? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share. And I'll see you next week.