Thinking about how much I know that I don’t know. I want to claim there is a lot, and the key to my intelligence is that I know it. Meaning, I know that I don’t know it.

For example, electrical and plumbing issues in my house. I know what I can handle, yet will quickly announce when I cannot repair the problem at hand. This is not quitting. See, I know what I don’t know. I feel like this makes me smart, yet again, I don’t know that it does.

So often people stop trying when they don’t know what to do. They miss out. We were hiking in Sedona and lost the trail. It took four or five attempts before we found one that allowed us to make it up the ridge. At the top was an amazing cave well worth the effort to get there.

The definition of problem solving is “what you do when you don’t know what to do.” I have a process that I do, which makes me really good at problem solving. Don’t claim that this takes me out of problem solving because I know what I do when I don’t know. I keep saying it is important to have a set of things you try when you don’t know.

As a senior in high school I finished second in all of the state of Ohio on the Ohio Math League tests. Would have been first but I slept in too long the final week out of six as the test was before school started. Teacher was pissed at me, but I knew that. I didn’t know three of the six answers because I didn’t have time, but I knew that.

One problem I knew I didn’t know which was why I got the answer right, so I contrived a way to solve it. When I showed everyone in class my solution, we had received our tests back and I had all of the right answers, the teacher said I should not have been able to solve it that way, but the conditions of the problem allowed me to make the assumption and arrive at a solution. I didn’t know another way, so I knew that I had to solve it that way.

I didn’t intend for this to be about math, it is about not knowing and knowing it.

I think that there is a lot more to say about it, but I don’t know yet. At least I know that, which helps tell you to look for more over the next several weeks. Gives my brain time to work on what I don’t know.

Have a Happy Friday.

Follow the links to either of the previous two weeks posts if you don’t know what they were about.

https://docdavedewitt.com/2024/05/03/please-learn/ https://docdavedewitt.com/2024/05/10/cant-be-me