No matter how smart you think you are, you're probably wrong. At least, that might be what Cornell professor of social psychology David Dunning would say. And oddest yet, if you believe you're competent you probably aren't. And vice versa.An excellent Opinion piece in the NY Times opens our eyes to how much we don't know, whether it's the melting point of beryllium of all the possibilities that lie before us in Scrabble. But it does tell us something: when we know what we don't know, we're more likely to grasp just how much our ignorance really surpasses our intelligence. And what better place to start than "unknown unknowns."

Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

A Long Way from Turing

Now if there ever were a "secret" to exploiting, as it were, our limited knowledge might be the ability to get machine help in rapidly making inferences we cannot. Well fear not because our philosopher and mathematics brethren have been researching Automated Reasoning. And to that we say, "Huzzah!" The more possibilities the less we are bound to our old ways of thinking.