What We Don’t Know, Don’t Notice, Don’t Ask About, and Don’t Remember

The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia; if you want to print it out so it’s legible and useful, print the original over four letter-sized pages and paste them together (my printout is taped, tellingly perhaps, over my rarely-used TV). The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the online version includes links to, and pop-up summaries of, the wikipedia articles explaining each bias, by TillmanR. The technical term for the phenomena described in this article’s title — the things we don’t know, don’t notice, don’t ask about, and don’t remember — is negative cognition or negative epistemology. But if I’d titled my post that, even I wouldn’t read it. Those of you old enough to remember the execrable Bush Jr war criminal Donald Rumsfeld will probably recall his blather about “unknown unknowns” — the things we don’t even know we don’t know. Of course he didn’t invent the terms — the matrix of known/unknown known and unknown things has been used in defence…