The inverse law of ignorance and contempt

The less you know, the less you know of your ignorance. The less you care, the less you care that you are uncaring.

These facts follow logically from the nature of things, of course. Your ignorance is only one more thing which you can know better or worse; your ability to care is only one more thing about which you can care more or less. If you are ignorant, you will be ignorant of ignorance; if you are contemptuous, you contemn your contempt.

Last repetition, since I find this phrasing funny: if you don’t know, you don’t know you don’t know; and if you don’t care, you don’t care you don’t care.

This fact is not new, and indeed it is obvious. But despite being known, it lacks a proper name. The entire object of this blog post is to give it a name, so as to refer to it by that name later. It comes up often enough to deserve one.

The fact about ignorance related here is often called “the Dunning-Kruger effect”. This is an incorrect name, because it is a misuse of the study done by Dunning and Kruger. Popular graphs, with confidence peaking at a small height of knowledge, are completely fake and not from the study. So we need another name. And since I am more aware than most people that spirit has two operations, being knowledge and love, I have decided to include the fact about love when giving the name.

As you might have guessed, I have settled, for the moment, on the name that titles this blog post: “the inverse law of ignorance and contempt”. Either side may then be referred to as “the inverse law of ignorance” and “the inverse law of contempt”. But I will suggest some alternative names below; as long as you settle on one, you will be able to refer to this fact more often, which is my object.

• First, you might call it the “inverse law of knowledge and love” and similarly divide it. I don’t think it makes a difference whether you use the positive or the negative words.
• When using the negative words, it seems to make sense also to omit “inverse”, so you might call it the “law of ignorance and contempt” if you prefer.
• Instead of speaking of “laws”, you might emphasize the perplexing nature of this fact by calling it a “paradox”, as in, the “paradox of” knowledge/love/ignorance/contempt.
• Since knowledge and love are the two operations of spirit, I once referred to this as the “paradox of greatness of spirit”, which a friend abbreviated to “PoGoS” – the idea being that spirit may be greater, either in knowledge or in love. You might do that if you want. I have changed my preference of name because I prefer directly naming the two things that the fact is about, rather than an unknown generic name for both of them.

I hope this blog post’s suggestions of terminology will help people speak of this fact more often, when it’s appropriate, and stop misusing the names of Dunning and Kruger. Conveniently, when writing in a hypertext medium, you might hyperlink your favorite name to this blog post, which will allow someone to understand it without your having to explain it, if you want to be brief. I certainly intend to do this in another blog post at some point.