The Five Orders of Ignorance:

Idea of Ideas ■ Inputs on Insight ■ Constructs of Concepts ■ Thoughts on Thinking
■ Knowledge of Knowledge ■

What is this thing we call "knowledge"? How do I know what I know? How can we measure knowledge? How would I know that one thing is knowledge but another thing is not? Does knowledge have attributes? If so, what are they?

This blog/website is based on ideas formulated and published initially in my book The Laws of Software Process and then in the Business of Software column I wrote for 18 years for the Association for Computing Machinery's flagship magazine Communications of the ACM.

I'm trying to answer some of the above questions or, when I can't do that, to show why we have questions in the first place. I can't claim that any of these ideas are "new"—they're not. Indeed, many of them have their origins in Socratic Dialogues (esp. Thaeatetus), but I hope they might stimulate other thoughts and ideas.

In large part, I'm putting these ideas down as much to help me think through these issues as to elicit comments, agreement, or disagreement. Though any of these, respectfully given, are most welcome.

Phillip Glen Armour January 2022

Contents:

The Intrinsic Recursion of Knowledge
Knowledge Models
- - No Definition, No Metric ■ The Unclassification of Knowledge ■ Noise-Data-Information-Knowledge ■ NDIK-Wisdom
Knowledge and Knowing
- - Knowledge, the Knower, Store ■ Knowing Example: Software Tests ■ Where Knowledge Comes From
Five Knowledge Storage Media
- - (1): DNA ■ (2): Brains ■ (3): Hardware ■ (4): Books ■ (5): Software
  - Characteristics of Knowledge Media ■ Knowledge Storage Media: The M9 Bazooka
How Do We Know What We Know?
- - (1): Resisting Knowledge ■ (2) : Discounting the Quark ■ (3): Knowledge and Frameworks
How Do We Learn Things?
- - (1): Patterns of Thought ■ (2): Structure and Restructure ■ (3): Repetition and Similarity ■ (4): Knowledge and Context
Dunning-Kruger
- - (1): Knowledge and Self ■ (2): Metacognition ■ (3): The Dunning-Kruger Graph ■ (4): What is to be Learned? ■ (5): Failing to Learn from Failure
Measuring Knowledge
- - (1): The Bucket, not the Contents ■ (2): Measures and Indicators
The Five Orders of Ignorance (5OI)
- - Ignorance as Knowledge
  - The Five Orders of Ignorance: An Overview ■ 0OI ■ 1OI ■ 2OI ■ 3OI ■ 4OI
The Value of Ignorance
Knowledge Storage Modalities
- - Full Integration of "New" Knowledge ■ Parking Lot Storage ■ Bolt-on Attachment ■ Partial Paradigm Shift ■ Total Paradigm Shift ■ Denial and Rejection
A Good Question
- - 0OI Questions ■ 1OI Questions ■ 2OI Questions
Reflexive Learning
The Lemma of Eternal Lateness
The Dual Hypotheses of Knowledge Discovery
The Learning Edge
- The Learning Edge ■ Learning and Flow ■ Competency Zone and the Comfort Zone ■ Accelerated Learning
Dunning-Kruger and the 5OI
Thinking, Knowledge, and Artifact