The Fourth Quadrant of Knowledge

> The thing about subject matter experts is that they’re so good at their subject, they often aren’t aware of what they know.

It isn't quite the same thing, but "tacit knowledge"[1] is similar to this concept.

The difference is that the author is talking about things you don't know you know, where tacit knowledge is for things you know that you may have self-awareness but have difficulty conveying.

My favorite example of tacit knowledge is knife sharpening. Even with hundreds of 4k videos of it on YouTube, it's still very hard to teach because so much of the skill rests on the sense of pressure while you're sharpening, which can't be conveyed in video.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

“'There are unknown unknowns', and while the idea has been around a while, it doesn’t seem to have a name."

There is a name for it. It's called "radical ignorance".

The whole AI paradigm is shifting the tide towards known unknown from unknown unknowns. At least, it feels like it.

This is called the curse of knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

There are also things that you don’t know that you know—muscle memory, habit, trauma—you know how to walk but you don’t remember how you figured it out for the first time.

Cognition is like an iceberg and the unconscious is the part that is under the surface—it has vast and unseen depths.

Is it really 2026 already?