The Five Orders of Ignorance
The the last two weeks (on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays), I've been in class for new test leads. Today we talked about estimations and one of the major problems we have is when we make estimations, we lack the knowledge to make perfect estimations. They gave us a model for classifying the lack of knowledge you may have, or in their words "order of ignorance". I thought this was a good way of classifying things. Here they are:
0th Order Ignorance (0OI)—Lack of Ignorance. I have 0OI when I know something and can demonstrate my lack of ignorance in some tangible form, such as by building a system that satisfies the user. 0OI is knowledge. As an example, since it has been a hobby of mine for many years, I have 0OI about the activity of sailing, which, given a lake and a boat, is easily verified.
1st Order Ignorance (1OI)—Lack of Knowledge. I have 1OI when I don't know something and can readily identify that fact. 1OI is basic ignorance. Example: I do not know how to speak the Russian language—a deficiency I could readily remedy by taking lessons, reading books, listening to the appropriate audiotapes, or moving to Russia for an extended period of time.
2nd Order Ignorance (2OI)—Lack of Awareness. I have 2OI when I don't know that I don't know something. That is to say, not only am I ignorant of something (for instance I have 1OI), I am unaware of this fact. I don't know enough to know that I don't know enough. Example: I cannot give a good example of 2OI (of course).
3rd Order Ignorance (3OI)—Lack of Process. I have 3OI when I don't know a suitably efficient way to find out I don't know that I don't know something. This is lack of process, and it presents me with a major problem: If I have 3OI, I don't know of a way to find out there are things I don't know that I don't know. Therefore, I can't change those things I don't know that I don't know into either things that I know, or at least things I know that I don't know, as a step toward converting the things I know that I don't know into things I know. For system development, the "suitably efficient" proviso must be added, since there is always a default 3OI process available: try and build the system. Whereupon the customer can be relied on to inform me of all the things I did not know.
4th Order Ignorance (4OI)—Meta Ignorance. I have 4OI when I don't know about the Five Orders of Ignorance. I no longer have this kind of ignorance, and now, neither, dear reader, do you.
These 5 come from an ACM paper here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=352194&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=7044366&CFTOKEN=34369341
(btw, for non-computer folks, most things in computer land start with 0, so that's why it's 0-4. This is a computing paper).
