Is ignorance bliss in a digital world?

If we look hard enough, we have access to information online about any person, place or issue we may think we need to know about. But is this always a good thing? In The Digital Human: Bliss Aleks Krotoski asks, are there some things that we'd be better off not knowing? Is ignorance bliss?

Prof. David Dunning works in the psychology department at the University of Michigan. His research suggests that even with vital information at our fingertips, and the fire hose of facts we are now exposed to at every turn, we can still be misguided.

The “Dunning-Kruger Effect” is, he explains, the idea that incompetent or uninformed people don’t know how little they know and they’re not in a position to know how little they know, because if they knew, they’d be taking steps already to correct it. It comes in to play in intellectual, professional and social tasks, ‘because often the knowledge we use to judge our actions is exactly the same knowledge we use to produce those actions in the first place and so… we’re really not in a position to know when we might be choosing incorrectly.’

Prof. Dunning says it’s interesting to see how the digital world interacts with the Dunning-Kruger effect: ‘There’s a lot of information out there… the truth is out there now, at our fingertips, but there’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of misguiding stuff.’ So, although people can become quite knowledgeable in this digital age, they can also be misled, without knowing it.

In Aleks’s words, “Google points us down a lot of rabbit holes.”

…and being misguided can get us into trouble

Dunning applies the Dunning-Kruger effect in a medical context: ‘A lot of people nowadays don’t go to doctors. They try and diagnose themselves based on what they find on the internet.’ For those that do go, the doctor disagrees with their diagnosis a third of the time, which suggests that not only do people think they’re experts, but unfortunately they’re not necessarily the best-informed experts.

‘The internet does allow people to collect information, think that they are knowledgeable, think that they know everything there is to know about an area, when in fact there’s a lot they don’t know – but unfortunately they don’t know that they don’t know.’

The real problem is having the wrong information – this can get us into trouble: ‘People will act on those misbeliefs and they might act in such a way that leads them to calamity.’

So does Prof. Dunning think ignorance is bliss? ‘Being completely uninformed actually is sometimes much more ok than having false information.’ But in terms of whether it is better to be uninformed rather than truly informed, ‘that’s a question that has been debated by philosophers since forever.’

Film-maker Lulu Wang and her family went to great lengths to keep her grandmother’s terminal diagnosis hidden from her, believing it was in her best interests. Was it the right decision?

Nai nai [“Grandmother”] was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and the doctor believed that she didn’t have very long to live: “Probably three months at the most.” Collectively, the family decided to keep it a secret from Nai nai in the belief that it was better for her to remain blissfully ignorant. She was symptom-free, and they felt that, knowing her personality’, on hearing the truth, she would panic and get really depressed, stop eating and stop sleeping. So her sister, Little Nai nai, told Lulu’s grandmother that everything was fine, even going so far as to redact her hospital test results.

Lulu, however, felt it was really wrong: “It was my grandmother’s life and her own decision as to how she might want to spend the last moments of her life… On top of that, you know, maybe she should have been in a hospital getting treatment.’ Nai nai wasn’t aware of her condition so she couldn’t make her own choices.

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon and author of the book, Do No Harm. Throughout his career he has been faced with deciding how much information to give patients about their condition. Does he think it is it better to maintain ignorance, or to tell them the whole truth?

‘It’s difficult because you often don’t have very much time to get to know the patient and the families, and what they could cope with,’ says Marsh. He remembers seeing patients who had been told they had inoperable aneurisms and their life had been ruined by it –they became nervous wrecks. “With modern medicine there are so many scanning investigations done which can turn up coincidental abnormalities, which may or may not matter.” With his teaching he tells his trainees, “If you’re not going to operate on something like an aneurism, it’s terribly important how you convey that information so you don’t terrify them.”

Marsh sat on a government committee advising on the human variant of “Mad Cow disease”, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. If a patient had had multiple blood transfusions or brain surgery there was a very small risk of contracting the disease. His feeling was, ‘If it’s untreatable, which it is, are you actually doing people a favour by telling them about it?’ He adds that although paternalism has become a dirty word in medicine, “I think there is still a case for it sometimes: ignorance is bliss, human beings being what we are.”

Four years on, Nai nai is still alive. She discovered the truth about her condition and reacted in the very way that Lulu’s family feared she would – “very dramatic and very emotional.” Did they do the right thing to keep her in blissful ignorance? Lulu doesn’t know: ‘We can’t go back in time and change and say, ok if we told her the truth how many years would she be alive?” But when asked if she thinks they made the right decision, Little Nai nai is adamant: “Well obviously, I mean look at how long she’s lived.”

Ignorance was not the magic pill that kept the cancer at bay, Aleks says, “but perhaps Nai nai’s lack of knowing meant that she lived her life as usual, with less stress, without the burden of knowledge.”

The joy of not knowing something can clearly have very serious consequences, Aleks says, but our drive to figure things out has taken each of us at some point in the wrong direction. Too much information can lead to even more uncertainty or, certainty in something that doesn’t actually deserve it: “It may not have a good rep but there are times when ignorance can still be bliss.”