Tanya Cushman Reviewer Reviewer's Name Thanks for the kind introduction. Great having me here. Oh, there it is. Okay, good. What do we have in store? I'm going to say a little bit on terminology. Sonja has run into that topic also. But when we talk about ignorance slash non-knowledge, there's older terms in the English called nations, and also there's a major difference in the German ignorance that a lot of people are using, and the term in English, and many other languages. That's where often the misunderstandings start already, right, among people whose mother tongue is, for most of you in the room here, or for many of you, is English. What I probably want to point out most is looking at not knowing in everyday life, secret. Sonja mentioned secret, but I think a secret, especially from a sociological point of view, is something very complicated, and it's something that, from a sociological point of view, is something very complicated. And it's something that, from what we know, animals don't have, right? And we have to learn it too. For those guys, a few guys who have kids, you know how difficult it is for very young kids to keep a secret without blushing red and so like. So we have to learn it. It's what makes us human. So it's an accomplishment to have a culture with secrets. They can be misused, we know that too, but at first sight we'd say, well, secrets are something normal, but actually it's quite complicated. We're going to look at not knowing in science because here the unknown is what drives progress, so to speak. Hypothesis building is kind of a clarification of what is unknown, right? It's a fascinating thing here, but there are also problems, growth in scientific knowledge and ignorance that can be a challenge, I'd say. And we have another challenge here. It's a paradox, so to speak. We talk about something for the last two hours or so that by definition is not there. But we don't have really a problem with that in everyday life yet again. But how to register it? How to analyze the interview transcript that Sonja has made, looking at where exactly can we detect the unknown. That's not a trivial point, and some of the questions raised here in this room already point to this challenge. And then we have the real world. We all know we can cope with unknowns and ignorance wonderfully. You look at me very suspiciously now, right? So I'm very glad I don't know what you think of me now. So it protects me here. We have our strategies to cope with ignorance in a wonderful way. In everyday life, we all know how to do it, right? So I'm not gonna tell you everything here because I think you may be a little uneducated, right? So it will harm you if I overburden you with all these terms that Sonja has been using, right? So it's good for you, right? So in everyday life, you know how to do that. And, but then there is the real world also of rhetorical policy making, where everything has to be certain and sure. It has to be 27 it's 26 well then it's not true but maybe there's a leeway between 26 and 27 right and that is also something we should be clear about when we when we talk about the Church of ignorance we want to foster ignorance and and kind of make it making it more more attractive to cope with, to learn about it and put it more in the center, right? And being honest to ourselves, right? Asking questions that are seemingly stupid, but often the stupid questions, seemingly stupid questions from my students are the best ones, right? Because they ask the fundamental questions. What is epistemology actually? Great question, best question of this month, I reckon. So in that sense, we should be more honest about what we do not know, because that can be a foundation for progress, for decision making, for moving forward, right? So in my outlook, I will look at certain hints on how we can foster this courage to have a knowledge gap in everyday life, but in other contexts too. And also we need to find, talking about language and talking about words, we need to learn to talk about them, right? And I hope by the end of my talk, we have a few pointers at least to better talk about what by definition is not there and bring some order into the unknown. So, not knowing in everyday life. Secrets, I said a word on secrets already. We know that there's strategies of spreading ignorance, doubt, climate change has been mentioned a couple of times, so I'm not going to dive into that. I can also pretend to not know something, right? Which can be good or bad, right? Pretending not to know something, so yet you don't feel stupid altogether, can be a good strategy. There's nothing wrong with that. So depending on how you pretend something, that can be completely legitimate. You know the good old game along car drives with your kids. I can see, hear that to make the drive a little shorter. I can hear and smell something that you can smell. Well, I don't know how good that works, but you know the game, how I can see something. I can produce something you cannot produce. That's wonderful. The classical division of labor, right? You're an engineer. Wonderful, right? You've done something else. You're a teacher. That's very good. I am just a sociologist. From my parents my parents perspective that means I cannot do anything but for for not for most people that is also kind of a more or less legitimate profession and so I'm glad I have you as an engineer here so I can rely on on on on the important stuff right so that's a division of labor. So non-knowledge in everyday life is normal, and it's good, it can be really good, right? Because we cannot do and know everything, right? The actions of other people, right? The audience here, which I've never met before, right? That may be something that I misinterpreted, and it links to some of the things you've been looking at. Maybe it would be interesting also to look into psychological work on pluralistic ignorance, right? Where the misunderstanding of other people makes you, because you believe something that is wrong about them, behave in a certain way. That can be bad. It can also be good sometimes because it protects you. But in many cases, it's the opposite, right? The right not to know, you mentioned Peter Wehling, he has worked on the right not to know, the right to non-knowledge that you have in prenatal genetic testing, right? Where you have the right, I'm going to say a few more words on that in a couple of minutes, but you have the right to not know something, right? It's legally protected that you're not informed about something, about your body, about your genetic setup, right? And that is something completely new in modernity that has probably not happened in 5,000 years of civilization we've had so far, as far as we know. And of course, we have the classical not wanting to know. What you don't know does not hurt you. What you don't know doesn't make you hot, right? So in everyday life, wonderful. We all have that strategy not to know something and it protects us, right? And we very often say, well, I don't have to know that. What do I need to know that for, right? Don't waste my time. And there's so many other points here of not knowing in everyday life. And I'd like to delve into some detail here in the next 40 minutes. Is that okay? Are you still awake in 40 minutes? 45 minutes also? I'm not going to talk until one o'clock until the hunter-gatherer specialist, but don't worry. But a little less than an hour, okay? So I have my watch here. Let's say a few things on words. For those of you who have never heard of ignorant studies or agnotology or whatever before, these are kind of my extracts that follow from the literature. And I know from Sonja's talk, she has a little different take on the whole shebang, but it shows that this field is still developing, right? So we have not that clear definition on this and that. This is a chair and this is a table. No, in ignorant studies, we're still searching for words in order to analytically make distinctions between fields and between empirical phenomena, for that matter. Well, here we are with a basic term, ignorance, in the English language. And the native speakers among you, Lindsay, you can correct me here, but that's what I've learned in debates, and that's a major misunderstanding also when people with a German background who use the term ignorance talk about the topic. It has its ignorance is a term with meanings ranging from actively not knowing something what I just said well you shut out certain fields of knowledge you don't want to know you're too lazy right you're too tired maybe also too dumb, but don't tell anyone. But also it can be happening that you're just unaware of it. So it's not your fault. Or you forgot something. So you're being ignorant by accident or something like that. And that is all covered with the term ignorance in the English language. Not so the word ignorance in the English language. Not so the word ignorance in the German, where you actively bracket out a certain set of knowledge or information, right? And that is the first of the etymology of the terms is the same, right? But in, at least in the parts of Germany, I'm familiar with normally ignorance means it's your fault, right? You were too lazy to go to the library and check out the book. So you're ignorant. It wasn't like the library was closed. Then it would be, you would still be ignorant, but it wouldn't be your fault. Then in the German, you wouldn't call it ignorant. At least not, I wouldn't call it that. Not knowing, I mean, these are terms that I'm going to use in my talk and that have been used here in the last couple of hours. Not knowing, you're not in the know. That can mean everything, right? You're willing to learn and that's the foundation. If you realize what there is that you don't know is kind of the foundation for learning, right? Knowing or unknowingly, that's not the point. But that is normally what we talk about when we, what we mean when we talk about the term, we use the term not knowing. Non-knowledge is a term that at least in ignorance studies that Lindsay and I have developed it is, and Peter Wieling also, the name came up, we've been using the term, using our German background as a direct translation of the German term nicht wissen, which points to asymmetry between the known and the unknown, between knowledge and ignorance, right? And also to analytically kind of put both terms and both concepts on the same, I'm going to use the word, bear with me, the same epistemological level, right? So that we say, okay, knowledge and non-knowledge are, from an analytical point of view, have the same value, right? And they can be used and they can be misused, like but have the same value, right? And they can be used and they can be misused, like knowledge can be misused, right? And this symmetry and its natural flip side, so to speak, is probably mostly used in sociological terms that aims to put knowledge, I'm going to read it out from the slides here because maybe you can't see it from these things here, to put knowledge and ignorance on the same plane, sometimes it's called specified ignorance, 1920s, 1930s sociology, you find these terms, and also you know the Rumsfeld terms of known unknowns, known unknowns, and known unknowns, et cetera, right? From a etymological perspective, the term non-knowledge is much older than ignorance in English. That's interesting, right? But it's not much in use in everyday language in English in the last 200 years or something. That's what etymologists explain to me who are better in English than I am. But we're changing that. We're working on that. Nescience is a term that is even older than that, and I'm going to use this term one more time here in my talk. Up until the 19th century, that was rendered the term to talk about ultimate ignorance, the true unknown unknowns. And even going back further in medieval theology, Nashians was rendered God's knowledge. Knowledge we were, we as human beings, were not even allowed to look for, right? So something that is out there, but it's not accessible to us human beings. And that has changed in the last, let's say, 500 years. And there's many, many, many other terms. Unknowing, forgetting, we often forget things. We suppress things, We displace thoughts. We destroy information, knowingly or not knowingly, strategically or not, right? So there's many, many, many words. But in my talk here, if these terms come up, they roughly go in this direction. If you have questions and if there's terms that you don't understand, please ask me. And if I don't know, then I'm going to tell you, I don't know. I'm not going to circle around and do a little talk. We as sociologists have been trained talking a lot so that at the end of the day, I ask the question, did I answer your question? And you say, yes, but actually I didn't. So if I don't know, I tell you as a first step on how to cope and learn about the unknown. Let's be honest about what we're talking about. Okay, here are the hunter-gatherers, Walter. But that's the only thing I have to say about that. But nevertheless, we can ask the question, well, we talk about ignorance here. That's kind of nice and dandy, and it has to do with playful, playing around with things and terms. But actually, if we look at why the focus on the flip side of knowledge is becoming ever more important, there is this hypothesis that after the agrarian societies, your wonderful hunter gatherers even before that, overlapping with industrial societies, we now do live in a knowledge society. That has been questioned a lot, but it's been debated also in many corners, and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, always talked about our knowledge society, unsere Wissensgesellschaft, and even the German Chancellor Merkel did so. Whatever she meant by it, I don't think she knew herself, but nevertheless we use the term knowledge society. What does that mean, knowledge society? If that hypothesis of the knowledge society is true, I'm not saying I'm supporting that, but it's an analytical category that is in use quite a bit. There's an alleged structural change from industrial society to new forms of social cooperation, societal cooperation and production. And here we have the acquisition of knowledge. And that points to the discussion we've had here after Sonja's presentation that knowledge is so important that we often forget about the natural flip side of the whole shebang, right? What we also see here is that we do have a closer coupling between science and society, right? science and society, right? In 300 years ago, when modern science as we know it moved away from religious influences, so we needed this space out there called science, the scientific laboratory as kind of the archetype or the ideal type of that scientific development. And today we have a closer coupling between, or we can observe a closer coupling between science and policymaking. And that is a good thing or a bad thing. We can debate that later or you can debate it anytime with your colleagues. But the thing is we can observe that, right? So that science is becoming more prone to political influences. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but it means that we cannot have, I mean, it's taxpayers' money, let's face it. We cannot have scientists in the ivory towers that produce research questions that have no solution for anyone, right? So in that sense, I mean, there's a closer coupling between practical work and society. But the generation of new knowledge means that the awareness of new knowledge gaps is also rising. And I'm going to say a few more words on that because it also increases new uncertainties, risks and of course ignorance. Now the knowledge society is a very positive outlook on society so we could say it's all good but we have kind of ignored the natural flip side of knowledge. And so the question is, what's new? Is there any challenge here? So I'm going to say, throw in a big however here, right? However as an interruption, where you see, oh, it may not be that easy and smooth and linear as we thought so far. And there's going to be a few howevers during my talk in the next probably half hour by now. Okay? Good. Just an example here. Right? It's an obvious example. You may laugh at it. We have so many KPIs, key performance indicators, in our scientific work where we measure about everything, right? We compute everything, we have data models for everything, and by the end of the day have you really understood something so much better than we thought, right? And that is one of the pointers where we can empirically show, or quantify, that more knowledge, more data, more indicators may not always be. I'm not saying that it's any bad, but we also need to learn how to treat them, and also need to learn how these again can produce new knowledge gaps. I'm going to say something on that in a few slides on from this one here right so the question is more knowledge does not necessarily mean better decision-making a better world if you will right because it depending on what information we produce and I use the term knowledge information interchangeably I know there's a big debate on that but just for the time being here interchangeably. I know there's a big debate on that, but just for the time being here in this context, I think it's okay to use these terms interchangeably. Okay? So let's go back in time just a little bit, 150 years, say, not hunter-gatherers. Don't worry. Then we will still be here by 1 o'clock. So I think you guys want to have a dinner one sooner or later. So let's go back in time a little bit. Since I'm a sociologist by training, it's a classical sociology. He wasn't a sociologist by training. He was a biologist. But nevertheless, some of his writings in philosophy were also rendered classical sociology today. So what did Spencer do? I'm gonna read that out, because you cannot read it, as regards ignorance and what he called nations. And that's what I said. I'd use the term nations here for, no, one more time probably. But it shows the book I'm quoting from is from the 1850s, where the term was still used in English language, obviously, apparently. So what does he say? Regarding science as a gradually increasing sphere, we may say that every addition to its surface does bring it into wider contact with surrounding nations, slash ignorance. And this sphere, let's talk a little bit on that sphere a little here. That sphere described, talk a little bit on that sphere a little here. That sphere describes the growth of ignorance is that every problem solved, not only in science, but also in everyday life, in decision making, in cooking, you name it, brings in its train new, I put it on here brings in its train new, I put it on here as horizons, but you know what I mean, new awareness of what is still unknown. And that's what drives us forward in a way, right? And as the knowledge sphere becomes larger, the surface of knowledge expands with it, generating yet more points of contact with the unknown. Now that sounds scary. I know it does. So let's linger on a little bit here on that, because what are we to make of this? Let's go back a little bit into classical debates on knowledge versus ignorance. And what I just outlined from Spencer who built on place Pascal by the way it wasn't Spencer's invention goes even back further don't get me wrong on that here we have an optimistic and a pessimistic reading right so let's assume we have knowledge here right and it's surrounded by its flip side, a sea of ignorance at a certain point in time. Then knowledge is represented by the radius of the sphere. Knowledge grows more slowly than ignorance, that would be the pessimistic reading of that move from time one to two, right? Is the sea of ignorance shrinking or facing out, right? So does more knowledge kind of eradicate ignorance or does the surface of knowledge bring us into more contact with the unknown, right? One is a positive, one is a negative reading. The optimistic interpretation, and I'd like to stay with that one here, that knowledge resides in the volume of the sphere, right? The more we know, though, it phases out the unknown, right? So in that sense, knowledge grows faster than ignorance, but we're never there, right? We always have to cope with the unknown in a very natural way because it's never going to change, right? And at certain points in time we even will move back for good or for bad reasons, right? So the con- the- I'd like to say that the context, the contact with the unknown makes us aware of The context, the contact with the unknown makes us aware of what is known, of what's still unknown, but it's not something that we should be afraid of, right? That at one point in time, the more knowledge we produce, we will be suffocated by all this ignorance. Although, looking at the world today, it may seem so at times, right? But in general, I'd say that more contact with the unknown is not a bad thing, because in the long run, we may replace it in the cases we have looked at so far. So growth in knowledge, does it mean a decrease in ignorance, right? Just to repeat a little bit here for those of you who have already fallen asleep. Whenever knowledge grows, so too does the perception of ignorance. That's the knowledge in the sea of ignorance metaphor that was used by Herbert Spencer and many others too. And Mittelstrasse, a philosopher from Constance, often used that metaphor too, by the way. Ignorance cannot be wiped out. We know that here in the Church of Ignorance, and we also know that this would be naive, but I nevertheless want to repeat that here, because from a sociological and STS perspective, knowledge is often less stable than we believe, and less stable that it is presented. But also we know that ignorance is more than a source of, or can be more than a source of misinformation, irresponsibility, et cetera. So let's move further to the time 1900, one of my favorite sociologists, Georg Simmel, who always wanted to be a philosopher, by the way. He never wanted to be called a sociologist. I wonder why, right? But nevertheless, he's normally known as a sociologist today. And he was the guy who said that the secret may be the greatest of humanity's achievements, right? Maybe not the greatest, well, what? It's an important pointer to the difference between hunter-gatherers, who also had secrets already, I'm pretty sure, but our animal forebearers may not have had that. The accostand is niedrig, does it make any difference for us here? So I have to talk faster, I reckon. So Zimmer was the guy in sociology, at least, who used the term non-knowledge, nichtwissen, in his reflections on secrets. And a secret, and we talked a lot about secrets, so Sonja also mentioned secrets. I mean, at the basis, a secret is the concealment of realities by negative or positive means, right? And you look at the relationship between that which is secret and the knownness. Well, that's where we put the demarcation line, so to speak. And what Simmel looked at was major changes in modernity because many things that were once rendered openly accessible are increasingly treated as a secret and vice versa. And he looked at certain examples. Now, I don't know. I think the thing froze already here. Let me try this. No, that works here. I'm not going to go through this table, don't worry. But it's just to give you a little flavor on what types of non-knowledge you can find in one of the classical authors besides the secret, right? The intentional non-knowledge, intentionally shutting out certain information, a regulation, you may say, in a process- way, of the distribution of knowledge by creating and maintaining conditions of no knowledge. What Simmel also looked at was strategic no knowledge in personal relationships. What you need to tell your friend, guys in the audience, but also your partner in order to keep the relationship interesting, etc. So Simmel looked at these issues here from a very micro-sociological perspective. Strategic non-knowledge in public. We have major changes in traveling and the seating arrangements that came about, from coaches to trains and also planes etc. We have today and that changed and some authors have looked at that the way we look at other people in Western countries at least and for how long and for how long it is allowed to look you in the eye for what and that changed because of different seating arrangements. So I look away after like 10 seconds, on your case 12 seconds, and because you just don't do that. It's something you're not allowed to do. And so I look away and I'm sort of strategically ignorant of what you do, what you eat and what you look at, right? Because I'm not allowed to do it. That has changed a lot in the last 200 years solely for the reason of traveling habits, right? At least that's a hypothesis by Simmel and later authors, right? And we have unknown expertise. I talked about the division of labor. I'm not going to delve into that any further. The not yet known, the classical scientific approach, we need to know more, we cannot come to a decision before we have this research project finished or before we have published that paper, etc. So let's look a little deeper into different types of unknowns that I've just looked at from a very superficial way. Secrets, top secrets, right? That's a classical form of strategically shutting out knowledge to a certain group of people, right? But we have everyday things, right? Trade secrets, right? Recipes, Coca-Cola's allegedly top secret recipe. That's kind of a classical trade secret that a lot of companies have. Probably Coca-Cola is the most well-known, but by and large, it's something classical and straightforward in that sense. And I looked into an example a couple of years back, a fascinating article by, you can't read it, it's called The Secret of Secret Societies, and looking at wine societies, where the flow of information is regulated about the availability of certain wines, right? And there is an occasional denial of its availability. The members know that this is happening, there may be a strategic denial, but they do not know whether it's true or not. But nevertheless, although they know the secret may not even be secret, it wets the appetite for exactly this one wine. And objectively, that wine is even more tastier than the other one that is easily available, right? And this is happening in business all the time. I just found that the wine case here especially interesting because if one seemingly cannot know something, one may want to know about it even more and wants the article, the object here, the wine even more so. And I thought that is kind of really interesting that we can call that second order secrets. I don't know if the term is any good, but it's just something that I thought about. Second order secrets sounds fancy in a little way. Secrets, one does not know whether they really exist, but the possibility that they may exist already makes an object and a product more interesting. So let's move on from winemaking to so-called wrong assumptions, where we do not know something that we could know, but well, and that changes our habits in a certain way. And I think that may also be interesting for some of the interview bits and pieces that Sonia talked about and individual protection right the right to not to know that I mentioned before in the 1930s already in psychology there was a term introduced pluralistic ignorance and it shows you that's a completely different term, a completely different usage of ignorance from the previous examples I gave. So my job here is hopefully to show you the broad range of ignorance studies and the terms and the usages and the interesting empirical cases on where we find ignorance and enrich our everyday life in a certain way. Let's talk about the actions of other people, what they think of us, talk behind our backs. And the problem that quantitative psychologists looked at, and we also see that in climate change, the debates, the situations in the minority position On a given topic is perceived. It's like I'm the only one who is You name it has a certain sexual orientation is behaving in a certain way and that makes you Shy makes you very outspoken makes you very talkative depending D right, so you have outspoken, makes you very talkative dependingly. So you have the wrong assumption about a minority versus majority position or vice versa and that changes your behavior. That's what in psychology is called probabilistic ignorance. I've just throw that in here that you get an idea of different ways of empirically approaching the unknown in different fields, in different areas of our contemporary society. Now, a topic that is dear to me, and again, Peter Willing has, among the German-speaking authors, done probably the best job from an analytical, sociological point of view, working in in this direction and that is what I mentioned before the protection of the individual right on the legal basis from knowledge or from information that you would like to receive because it can have negative consequences as regards the quality of life or decision-making more generally, right? Imagine you've been told, you go to a doctor, and you've been told that you have inherited a certain genetic defect from your grandparents that wasn't visible in your parents, and by the chance of 57%, or no let's say 27% you're gonna die at the age of 55 right well that's shocking 20% or the thing is there's nothing you can do about this disease right you can smoke less eat more salad and go to sleep earlier. Things you should do anyways, at least when you're beyond my age. But nevertheless, there's not much you can do about it. But this information can hurt you. It can, I'm not saying destroy your life, but it throws a shadow on your current happy life that you apparently have, right? You enjoy your beer, right? Oh, boy, 20%. I'd rather not have that beer now. What type of information is that? It's useless for your life in order to pursue a happy life, right? And, I mean, it's a simplified example I have here, right? Just to clarify the problem that more information and more detailed computing and risk assessments about your life sounds wonderful. 20%? I'm going to die by 55? Ooh. I mean, our grandparents weren't even aware of the possibility that you can think along those lines. They lived in the hands of God or whoever, right? But nevertheless, today we have the possibility to come up with such information that doesn't help us in every life. So the right to know knowledge is something we really need and it's developing in the medical sciences big time, and also on a legal basis. We increasingly have the possibility when it comes to prenatal testing to not have certain information about an unborn child, for instance. And I think that's an accomplishment. That's truly an accomplishment that we did not have for the last 5,000 years. And the question is here, can this notion be extended? And the Church of Ignorance implicitly shows us that it can in the sense that we need more right to non-knowledge. The debate we had with Walter and you guys in the back on, I'm proud of not knowing something for whatever reason. Maybe you're actually pretty dumb, but there may be other reasons for that. And I think the idea of we can, the right to non-knowledge, extend in a meaningful way, That would be a further accomplishment, and I guess we're working on that. Well, not knowing in science, that's kind of the classical topic when we talk about ignorance. We know that defining a certain knowledge gap, non-knowledge in that sense, is a prerequisite for research questions. It's a prerequisite for progress in scientists. And in that sense is a prerequisite for research questions. It's a prerequisite for progress in scientists. And in that sense, scientists use very well-defined ignorance to direct the research by hypothesis building. What is a hypothesis? It's a very specified form of what is not known, but what needs to be tested in an experimental setting or in a comparable setting, whatever, right? So in science, in natural science, in many of the natural science, but also social sciences, non-knowledge is something that is looked for, right? New research questions, right? But then on the downside, we do have the discussion in public, and you guys are working on it here in the Church of Ignorance, that unknowns are less favored in exchanges with policymakers, with people on the street, you name it, for obvious reasons and also for good reasons. But we need to be clear that ignorance is not always a bad thing. So I'm repeating myself here. Sonja has mentioned that many times before. The next, however, because if non-knowledge is normal and we need to flag it out, well, what's the problem here, right? If ignorance is normal, what's the problem? what's the problem here, right? If ignorance is normal, what's the problem? What's the problem here? And just one slide on the downsides, because I expected that Lindsay would talk about that last night, and also implicitly, Sonia did so, but we know that ignorance can be misused in the same way that knowledge can be misused. We have ignorance as absence or the opposite of knowledge, not the symmetry, the natural flip side. It's the opposite. It's the bad guy out there. It's a negative condition since decisions cannot be made. And it's true very often. If you don't know where the bathroom is, well, you're in trouble, right? But if you know the concept of the bathroom already and you know how to ask people, well, then you have specified your non-knowledge and you can move one step further. That was a stupid example that just popped up in my mind because I saw the door for the bathroom here. But don't forget that example. You get the point I'm trying to make, okay? And you know that knowledge that can often be excluded from circulation by one group, the classical secret here, it can be misused. And we have these wonderful examples from the tobacco industry in the 1950s, right? Robert Proctor and his wife, I don't know, did Londa Schiebinger actually work in tobacco? I don't know. I don't think so, whatever. So I always think the two together because I added the book together on ignorance, agnotology, a couple of years back. So the unknown as an excuse for doing nothing. Well, we don't have enough proof here. We cannot move forward, right? Let's forget climate change. It's too uncertain, all these models, right? We know that story, right? And that has been focused on a lot. And in my view, in our view here, I reckon, that has been overdone a little bit, right? And of course, there's also strategies to avoid accountability. And there's many forms of strategic ignorance. I just want to throw in the term here because Lindsay made that quite famous in the last 10 to 15 years. You did, come on. I looked at the little citation count, so you did a good job. What's that? Yeah. So you look humble. Okay. So we're all going to make it famous, even more so. Good. The next, however, number three, I don't know how many are going to follow, but I think I'm down to 20 minutes. Are you looking bored, Walter? Six o'clock. I'll be down by six o'clock. Promise. OK, this is observation that I've that we all make. Right. We have a gap between the official rhetorics, right? Whether it's on pandemics or on climate change, on what we know, certainty, every scientist knows. Well, and then we have the real world, our decision-making when it comes to non-knowledge, where I say, we know how to do it, right? In everyday life, we're so confident and so well trained to cope with the unknown right to to not say everything that we know because it would either bore you it would overburden you it's kind of normal right strategically bracketing out things for good or for bad reasons right but when it comes to decision-making in politics, well, uncertainties and especially ignorance is not well-versed. So we have the official version, trumpeting safety, certainty, etc. And then we have the real world. We have us. And that's kind of the sociologically interesting point that in everyday life, we know how to cope with secrets. But there are certain areas in society where ignorance does not go down so well and the goal the goal i think here and i think the church of ignorance is a great example for that is we need to learn to know on when we know enough about the unknown about certain knowledge gaps so we can move forward. And my idea is that we need the right terminology and we need to have clear categories on how the unknown is linked in a temporal perspective. Well, we had the old problem, growth in knowledge, growth in ignorance. What does that mean? What can we do about it? I think what we can do, and again, I think this setting here is a great step into this direction, making transparent what by definition is not there. And coming up with that is a great idea. Well, we should define and categorize the unknown to make some of it empirically accessible. That's why I was interested in Sonja's interview snippets. Where has she detected from the point of view where we don't know things? Well, if you interview people and they tell you, well I didn't know that and then I forgot about this, but that's normally not happening. Right? People sometimes go like, ooh, and they tell you, well, I didn't know that, and then I forgot about this, but that's normally not happening, right? People sometimes go like, whoo, and this whoo may be an indicator for micro sociological speech analytics, which I'm not, but that may be an example on pointing to where we see that people cope with the unknown, right? That may be an idea, right? And very often, well, we talk about what is known, right? The whole history of science, the history of the world is on knowledge. But also today we could emphasize how much about a given topic is not known yet, right? Why are different forms of ignorance slash no knowledge? And we should also learn, and I'm not saying I know how to do it, we should, we need to learn about it. Given our development from hunter gatherers to an alleged knowledge society, we need to enable clarity about the unknown. That means not trumpeting safety when there is none. And we need to have more courage to have knowledge gaps, which of course is easier said than done. And that also means we need to learn to live with what has always been there. It's not like back in the day people were so much smarter and had so much more knowledge, and today everyone is just ignorant. I think ignorance is probably one of the biggest elephants, smelly one for that matter, in the room. So how can we accomplish that? How can we move forward? Sociologists always come up with four-fold tables. matter in the room, right? So how can we accomplish that? How can we move forward, right? And sociologists always come up with fourfold tables, right? And I thought, well, by now you're probably overburdened with stereotypes about sociology. I have a sixfold table for you. Making ignorance transparent, a little typology here, and that's where the notion of nations is coming in. I'm not going to go through this table here. If you're interested in that, that's been published a lot in different versions. This is adjusted to today's speech here. But I think there's two things we need to look at. The intentionality of not knowing, right? And the temporality. Can we say at a certain point, okay, we don't know this or that yet, but after this project, this research project is done, after I've read this book, which will be in two weeks from now because I have time for the weekend, then we know something, right? The temporality of not knowing, right? We need to look at that. Can we make a statement on for how long a certain knowledge gap is going to be valid? Or is it something illogical that probably will never be solved, right? Looking at a continuum, right? Some knowledge gaps can easily be filled, others can probably never be solved, right, looking at a continuum. Some knowledge gaps can easily be filled, others can probably never be filled, but never say never, I'd say. So that's one thing. The intentionality, right, is an active approach that we can detect that somebody didn't, or some organization didn't want to know something, didn't want to register a certain set of knowledge because they don't want to move out of their worldview, out of their bubble, can we ascribe an intentionality or not? So we have this active versus passive non-knowledge category. And then we have a different epistemological class here. It's Nashians. Epistemological because it is something that we cannot know as observers on society, but also not as normal beings. It's what we can call unknown unknowns. You can know in hindsight that you know something. You can know in hindsight, oh, I could have known had I only had this book, right? But that book wasn't written at the time. So it's something you could not know. It's nation, it's God's knowledge, so to speak, right? So intentionality cannot be ascribed, right? And unknown ignorance, so to speak, can only be known in retrospect. And that is a different class of the unknown. can only be known in retrospect. And that is a different class of the unknown. And some people say CFC in the 1930s was such a case. You could not know any better, right? FCKW in the German, right? That case is very well known. And our friend Peter Wehling, he said, there was probably one or two persons in the 1930s who already knew something. What? We cannot know. But there's a huge debate on that. So we very often have that in scientific developments that there's something where an awareness of something cannot be ascribed to. You could not know at the time. It's a different class of the unknown. What we're looking for here probably also in the church of ignorance is the intentionality that can be ascribed as an analytical distinction and the temporality as well as the intention of people. Did they knowingly, by accident, or by some other reason not know something or didn't distribute a certain set of knowledge. or by some other reason not know something, or didn't distribute a certain set of knowledge, okay? So the take home message, so to speak, is we shouldn't be afraid of the unknown, and should also move further toward the normalcy of the unknown, right? Because, summing up here a little bit, hopefully, the unknown is right? Because, summing up here a little bit hopefully, the unknown is often as important and sometimes in the cases I looked at probably even more important than knowledge. And we know the problem. More data, more knowledge production does not necessarily mean that we have better foundations for good and safe decision making. We should view ignorance as regular rather than deviant in everyday life, in decision making but also in policy making. So that's something that's very important. And we need to close the gap between official rhetorics. Feeling pressed to know something, to have certainty about a certain thing. Let's be honest about how uncertain in the sense of not knowledgeable we are about many, many, many, many things. And we need to learn to know when enough is known about a certain unknown. Do we know enough about that knowledge gap to move further, to move forward, right? And that is kind of a type of thinking we often don't see in many circles, but we know it from everyday life in a certain way, right? And what I always tell my public relations people at UFC where I work in Leipzig is we should also add non-knowledge transfer to good old knowledge transfer. Because a lot of people say, well, in a research institution, we need to have wissens transfer for policymakers, for journalists, etc. You name it. But sometimes we should be naming what we have found in our research and what knowledge gaps it actually brought about. That's sometimes more interesting, or at least as interesting as knowledge. In some cases, it may be more interesting. And I think you guys here will add more points of normalcy to the whole process on what there is to know about the unknown. What's more to know? Now, Lindsay, here comes the self-promotion. You want to be humble. I try not to be so humble now. This is our handbook that was published last year, and the paperback version just came out. So you can easily buy it, buy your pocket money, buy whatever. I don't know how much it is, but there's money lying around here even. So that's probably the first step in that direction. It has 35 articles and almost all you need to know about not knowing, except non-knowledge in migration work processes. So you have to contact Sonja for that. Other than that, it's all in there, including brain research and how people often feel much more comfortable making a decision based on non-knowledge. Sounds scary, but you look at brain research and how happy you are, how, I mean, you said you're not looking at ignorance as bliss, but the situation where it actually is. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing per se. So even brain research is included. So what else there is to know, please raise any questions you may have, and I'd be happy to answer them. And if I don't know, I say I don't know. You have a difficult one. Terminology, please. My secret? No, I'm never going to tell you. My question was, I was thinking, tell me a secret of your success, is my question, from once you specialize on something and especially on ignorance and in not knowing or whatever you specialize on, you once come to a point where it is like there are so many layers and somehow you cannot know this is it. It's just going on and on and on and on as a scientist I guess and and then also this how much do I already know to also share it I think I'm at this point where I'm like okay actually I know a lot about my special field but when is the point where I'm like, okay, actually I know a lot about my special field, but when is the point where I can share it? Because there's still so much I don't know. And then my question was like, what's the secret of his success? Because you're the one who is standing in front and telling us about not knowing. Is it success, Lindsay? Is it success being the sociologist of not knowing? I don't know. I don't know, is it success, Lindsay? Is it success being the sociologist of not knowing? I don't know, I don't know. I mean, we can write fancy books and sell them and they're being discussed in the New York Times and stuff, so that feels good. Is that success for you? Well, we're quite successful. You're right. I never thought that. Yeah, I think it's really going to be having interest in filmmaking sort of enthusiasm for not knowing? Yeah, I think it's really going to be a problem. And in that sense, I'm on a mission here, right? If that's what you're alluding to. Because I truly believe that we have so many wonderful, I mean, I work in an institution that's 95% natural science-based, right? I'm kind of the alibi social scientist in the whole group. But the thing is that we can compute and develop so much fascinating knowledge and data that are, let's face it, of no use for anything, except for the scientists who are getting the money from the foundation or wherever they get that from. I'm exaggerating here. And then we need to be clear about what type of knowledge we produce and also how we cope with the unknown. So I'm on a mission here. But that wasn't your question. That was Lindsay's question. That was Lindsay that wasn't your question. That was Lindsay's question. That was Lindsay's translation of your question. I mean, how... Let me interpret your question. Yeah. Not you. The division of labor. You can... Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. That's a good question, actually. I don't know. I don't know at the moment. I'm gonna ponder on it tonight. Okay. There's no secret. You had a question? You looked like you had one. Enjoy your ice cream. What's that? I just wanted to put the thing you said in other words, maybe. Meaning, at what point did you get the confidence to talk about the things you not know? I mean, I came into that in... I mean, there were several cases, empirical cases where I was fascinated by the flipside of the known. The idea of secret societies, not the idea, secret societies in medieval times. That was something that some sociologists worked on. And how they function and how they survived over time based on secrets. Real secrets or just secrets that people thought they were there. And I found that interesting. I wasn't fascinated by it. But I think the point where I really thought we need to do something here was I was working in a major project on industrial site contamination and we were developing sustainability indicators for computer programming. So completely different topic. Had nothing to do seemingly with that. Very hands-on work together with scientists for solution of problems where can we place the kindergarten or where can we have a school or just a parking place based on the contamination that were in the ground solvents chemicals from in the industrial area in Eastern Germany right so it was a very practically practice oriented work and we had to develop sustainability indicators that we were using so we interviewed people stakeholders right engineers on the ground people that lived in the area everyone right investors and and and also a lot of engineering companies and then we analyzed the interviews and all my doctoral students and I've often said are these guys they often say we don't know and they nevertheless move forward. And I said, actually, a lot of the decisions are based on what they do not know. Because they were honest with us. It wasn't like a topic where journalists were interested in, where the media was looking at them. Because then they would have been too shy to talk about it. because then they would have been too shy to talk about it. But that was intimate interviews with stakeholders that worked on contaminated sites management. And we had the impression they were really successful by communicating what was unknown among them. So the success story was they need to learn to cope with the unknown. Right? And I thought, oh, we need to make more of that. So one of my co-workers, she wrote her dissertation on the topic, and that's how it happened. That's almost 20 years ago. The problem now is, that's not your question, but it's also interesting for you guys. Once we went with our data to the public, including the founding agency sitting in Magdeburg and Sachsen-Land, we had to face censorship. We were not allowed to publish our results because we were telling, well, these people did not know this and this and that. So they were threatening us. You tell us what engineer told you this statement here. And I couldn't sleep for six weeks or this and that, right? So they were threatening us. You tell us what engineer told us, told you this statement here. And I couldn't sleep for six weeks or something like that because as social scientists, we're not journalists. We have to keep our informant secret in that sense, right? We do not have to lay open that. And there was this pressure put on us to lay open on what was unknown, or who told us these stories about that they made decisions based on not knowing, right? And that was threatening. Well, that shows in policymaking, in the public, it's impossible still to this day to clearly say what is unknown, although the story was a success. I mean, quite concretely, we're talking about an investment in a, at the time, pleak area in Eastern Germany, and today that company is the number one in producing little pieces in toothpaste, right? They're the number one distributor of toothpaste. I don't know, I'm not a chemist, obviously. But it doesn't add anything to the story. But you see how difficult it is to communicate the unknown with the concerned public. What? You didn't know? You engineer? What did we pay you for? The success story wasn't all relevant. The public policymakers were just afraid of, they were funding people that didn't know anything, right? And that's a long, we still have a long way to go here, right? Well, that was one of the reasons why I got fascinated by it. Especially in education. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And if you already know that you don't know, and what you don't know, you sometimes know more than all the rest, right? Sonja? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the problem of not feeding into the stereotype that is attached to a specific group, but also when we think about science communication or science and policymaking, like the risk is super high to say, hey listen, we deal with a lot of uncertainty here, we do not have data and also communicate this is how scientific progress actually works scientific progress is based on disputes and dissent but how do you really communicate this to and I'm not talking about uninformed lay people, just not people dealing in that sort of specialized science, when we have the problem of doubt mongers saying exactly, well, even scientists disagree. And this also creates this risk of confessing your ignorance and your uncertainty here is a huge problem i don't know if you have an answer fine it was a very uh i think if bon jovi wrote a song about you it would be you give infotainment a Good Name. Thanks very much. So I'm not going to add anything to that. Thank you.