Full-Spectrum Ignorance

Long before there was Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel or the British series The Worst Jobs in History with Tony Robinson of the great Time Team, there were the curious and, at times, curiously strange folks who would eventually form the K-Landnews.

From an early age, some of us multiple personalities first tried to follow instructions given by parents, relatives, teachers, or a drunk in the park [who turned out to be a teacher, too].

Go play in the traffic!

Go fly a kite!

Go eat sh***!

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

We did them: we scared auto drivers, we made crows in a tree laugh with our 2x4 framed kite, we puked up rotten shell fish, and we drank such vast quantities of lemonade that the absence of type II diabetes is a miracle big enough to prove the existence of a higher power.

Eventually realizing that adult instructions often caused trouble, activities changed to more self-motivated ones, with mixed results. We already proclaimed ignorance to be the one truly inalienable human right in an earlier post, but we had not explored it much.

How does it feel to be ignorant? Can ignorance be measured, and if so, what units are used?

We started out by making a volunteer read German tabloid BILD. After a couple of weeks of reading nothing but BILD, our editorial guinea pig began to exhibit signs of mental sluggishness and asked for all newsroom notes to be written in font size 48 or greater, with all nouns in red.

Then serendipity struck: there is an ignorance test! Not knowing that an ignorance test existed should in itself be a good sign, doesn't it indicate a hidden natural capacity for ignorance?

Surprise, there are many different ignorance tests! There's a General Ignorance Test on dating site OKCupid.

That's not a good one, though, because it has a question about humps.*

We were looking for a scientific approach to ignorance and found it at The Ignorance Project. What a great name and a great disappointment. They want to fight ignorance.**

But there is a test, and our editorial volunteer took it and was found ignorant. The measurement unit was percentage points. This conflicts with the statement of a lady friend who holds that men generally express ignorance in inches or centimeters.

How does it feel to be ignorant?

Explained our volunteer: Life takes on a clarity I never thought existed. There is only one right answer.  To everything. I'm not fully there yet, I still catch myself having doubts, but it is getting better. Anybody got today's Bild Zeitung -- there is work to be done.

We will watch the development to see if our volunteer attains the most comprehensive state of bliss in ignorance: full-spectrum ignorance.

* Call us ignorant, but any question about humps on a dating site....
** By cramming facts down our throats. Seems to be an odd way of doing it.
*** C'mon!