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The final subdivision of the 5OI. Or not.
I have Fourth Order Ignorance (4OI) when I don't know about the Five Orders of Ignorance.
4OI is a form of meta-ignorance--ignorance about ignorance. Not the 2OI form of ignorance about what I don't know, but ignorance of the concept of ignorance
As mentioned earlier, I originally added 4OI to the lower orders of ignorance out of a love of recursion. Then, as I throught further about knowledge and ignorance, it became clear that all knowledge and all ignorance is inherently self-referential and recursive. So capping the 5OI with something that is extrinsically self-referential (4OI refers to the other orders of ignorance) and intrinsically self-referential (it refers to itself so 4OI contains 4OI) seemed appropriate. And kind of cute.
One could easily dismiss 4OI, making arguments such as:
I know a lot about knowledge and ignorance, but I just hadn't heard specifically of the Five Orders of Ignorance.
4OI is not a functional level. Knowing about it doesn't increase my knowledge except for finding out about this particular (4OI) label.
I don't really need to know about 4OI [1] , all I really need is the lower levels.
Indeed, 4OI is a concept rather than a practical step. But, in my heretofore chosen profession of software development, 4OI might be the most destructive of all.
My experience has been that almost all software development businesses consider their job to be to build and ship software or products containing software. Sounds reasonable, right? When I've confronted people in charge of running such businesses with this idea, I've mostly received blank stares. Some have scoffed at the idea. Almost all have ignored the idea. As mentioned (often) the real product is not software; software is merely the container for the real product. More correctly it is one of the containers of the real product--the other containers being the brains of the developers and the paper of the specifications and designs. Some of the knowledge is resident in software stores that are not populated by the application developers but exist in the operating systems, the programming language functions, and the various libraries available to, and needed by, the final product. While the application developers might not create the knowledge in these sources, they do need to know where the knowledge is and how to use it [2] .
So, almost all development organizations focus solely on the software "product" and do a very poor job of managing what goes into the software product. The business of software development has become better at developing reuse libraries over the years, but usually fail to maintain them. Programming languages have made great strides in encapsulating executable knowledge into the language syntax, but the developers still need to acquire the knowledge of how to use that syntax
4OI Inaction: An Example
Many years ago I was conducting a workshop on development methods to telecom companies. In the middle of the workshop a good number of the attendees learned that their project had just been canceled. Their company's powers-that-be decided they couldn't make a profit from the box they had built, so they just pulled the plug. [3]
The project that has been canceled was an in-building over-the-air ethernet Wi-Fi hub. Financial calculations showed that the company couldn't make the product for a price point where people would actually buy it and they would lose money on this project [4]. So management canned the product.
What the company didn't do was capture the knowledge acquired in building this product. Had the company done so, done it effectively, and then used the hard-won knowledge to build the next and next-next generation of these boxes. it would have had a five-to-ten year lead over other companies in consumer Wi-Fi. And they would have made a fortune. But they didn't. The company management viewed the box as the product, figured they couldn't make money on that particular box, and threw what they had learned out the window.
This is 4OI in operation--not understanding that:
The job is to learn...
...the real product is knowledge...
...and the knowledge can be very, very profitable.
FOOTNOTES
[1] There were originally only four orders of ignorance. 4OI evolved along with the thinking about the lower orders. So I guess, I had 4OI until I didn't.
[2] While the quantity of knowledge needed for language reuse is often a lot less--otherwise, why use the language--it can still be considerable. And there is always an intersection between knowing the language functions and knowing how to use them for the application at hand. That knowledge will still need to be obtained.
[3] The workshop then morphed into a job fair as those folks who has just lost their jobs started asking the other attendees if there were openings on their projects at their companies.,
[4] There were many limitations of this particular box, The primary one was that power limitations required line-of-sight to the hubs being serviced. Of course, if you have the latitude to arrange your computers in line-of-sight, you can probably run twisted pair under the carpet or under the flooring and you don't need Wi-Fi.
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