At ABB Robotics in Auburn Hills, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where I used to work as an engineer, there was a steel door without a window that opened out into a hallway. Whomever designed this must have been clueless. When someone opened the door into the hallway, he would not know anything about what was on the other side of the door.
One day I saw a couple of guys standing and talking in the hallway in front of the door. Suddenly a fellow engineer opened the door, and it slammed into one of the guys, who screamed “hey watch it!”.
The thought that occurred to me was “no you watch it! Standing in front of that door is pretty clueless. How is the guy opening the door going to know that you are there?”. I did not say anything.
The fact of the matter was that the designer, the door opener, the guys hanging out in front of the door, all of them were oblivious. In my opinion the guy standing in front of the door and then when something happened instantly blaming the other guy was the most clueless.
Obliviousness
Obliviousness is a state of being unaware or unmindful of something or being ignorant of its existence. Some synonyms are clueless, ignorant, and unmindful. The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts. Important facts that we know to be true and yet they are often surprising, shocking or disputed among non-experts.
However, I will write about other related things as well, and today I am musing about obliviousness and cluelessness, something that afflicts us all more or less. Without obliviousness and cluelessness this super-fact blog could not exist.
I got the idea for this post by reading a comment on another blog post where the author mentioned that “…a woman on her phone in the supermarket walked into my trolley this morning…”. The woman with the phone was oblivious to her surroundings because of her fixation on her phone, a very common situation. I think most of us are guilty of this on occasion, but it is very annoying when the person who was staring at the phone is blaming the other party.
The same is true for people who walk backwards in crowded places and then blame the people they bump into. There are different levels of obliviousness.
Obliviousness And Social Media
There are a lot of ways to be excessively oblivious. One of the most common and annoying examples on social media is in my opinion when people comment on articles they have not read.
I remember an experiment on Facebook where an organization posted an article with an intentionally misleading headline. The article was about something completely different, and the article even stated that the headline was misleading, and the article explained the experiment. If you read just a small part of the article you would know. The result was that most people commented on the headline, not the article. They did not read any of the article and fell into the trap.
Obliviousness pops up in all kinds of circumstances. On Facebook I am the administrator or moderator in half a dozen beer groups. In these groups people discuss and review beers.
One of the want-to-be influencers are posting in lots of groups without ever engaging with or reading other posts, with the result that he has completely missed that one of the beer groups is very international and was started by Italians. He unsuccessfully keeps trying to engage other members several times a day by posting questions such as “Don’t you love this unusually warm evening?”, “What beer are you drinking while watching the game tonight?”.
Basically, he thinks this international beer group is his hometown, not Belgium, China, Brazil, Germany, Italy or Australia. As a result, no one knows what he is talking about. After one year with hardly any likes or comments he still has not figured this out because he never looks at anyone else’s posts.
Oblivious Bilinguals
Another common example of extreme obliviousness happens when monolingual people judge bilingual people on their language abilities. I’ve written about that here.
People may speak and understand a second language perfectly and still have a strong accent in that language assuming they did not learn the second language in childhood. Unless you take speech therapy an accent is very difficult to lose in adulthood, something bilingual people know but many monolingual people do not know. You certainly cannot know everything, but when someone negatively judges people for having an accent their level of obliviousness is more extreme.
Oblivious To Facts
Perhaps the most comical example of an extreme level of obliviousness is when people who know very little about a subject lecture the experts in the field and even mock the experts.
I recently read about such an example. A man was writing to a theoretical physicist, an expert on the second law of thermodynamics, telling him that the second law of thermodynamics contradicted evolution and that the physicist was an idiot for not knowing this. The man had fallen in the trap of believing a common but basic misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
Not understanding the second law of thermodynamics is one thing, assuming that your brief encounter with it makes you a superior expert on the topic compared to an expert with a PhD in physics is a much higher degree of obliviousness. I should say I see this type of situation quite often on social media.
We can’t know or understand everything, and we are all more or less unaware of other cultures, places, the feelings and thoughts of others, we all get distracted sometimes, and we know a very tiny infinitesimal portion of existing knowledge, we are all oblivious. However, we can make it much worse by not trying.
What are your favorite examples of obliviousness ?
To see the Super Facts click here
Newstrade
HI Thomas, you shouldn’t generalise – smile! I know a great deal about other cultures. It is of great interest to me to learn and read about other cultures. I am South Africa, and we have 11 official languages here and each goes with its own culture. There are 13 official languages in Kenya and each also goes with its own culture. That is fascinating in itself. You come from Sweden. How many languages are there in Sweden and how many cultures. I know there are Sami people and their culture is different. I think their language is also different.
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I assume you are referring to my last paragraph “…we are all more or less unaware of other cultures, places,…..” You are right, generalizing is being oblivious. However, in regard to “more or less” I know you are definitely very much less. I know you know a lot about cultures, art, nature, literature, the world, economics, and much more and you have amazing experiences, and yet you approach everything with humility. So yes “being unaware” is much less in your case. It is very interesting that South Africa has 11 official languages with their own cultures and 13 for Kenya.
The official language of Sweden is Swedish but there are five official minority languages including Sami, Meänkieli (ancient Swedish form of Finnish), Finnish, Romany and Yiddish. I should say Sami, Meänkieli and Finnish are both very different from Swedish, like you say, not even related to European languages. A linguist told me that the north Swedish dialect I speak, Norrlandish, is really its own language, but not officially though. Norrland has the Swedish culture, but it is very countryside, and therefore a bit different from city thinking and attitudes.
A funny thing happened once when I visited my hometown. A woman at the cash register told me “it is so nice to hear someone speaking the old way” referring to my old-style Norrlandish. It is disappearing because of the TV etc. She continued “where do you live?”, maybe expecting me to live far out in the forest without a TV. When I said Dallas, Texas, in the USA, she looked surprised, and it seemed like she didn’t believe me.
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Hi Thomas, it is true that many people don’t travel and don’t take much interest in people and places outside of their immediate circle of reference. I was teasing you. Thank you for this interesting information. I have been to Helsinki, and it was very interesting. Everything was translated into Finish and the book shops were full of books by well know authors translated into Finnish. I found that very interesting. On the plane to Oslo, I sat next to a Norwegian man who was reading The Silmarillion by Tolkien in English. He said he’d previous read it in Norwegian and now he was reading the original.
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Yes, when I was a teenager I read a lot of classic science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, as well as some of Tolkien’s books and they were all translated into Swedish. Later in life I learned to read English books and I read the originals. For example, my favorite Arthur C. Clarke short story was the “The Wall of darkness” or “Mörkrets mur” in Swedish. However, I loved it even more in English because the somewhat poetic aspect of the story telling came though better in English. The first line in The Wall of Darkness is “Many and strange are the universes that drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time.”, which sounds better in English than in Swedish. When it is a bit poetic it tends to sound better in the original language.
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Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but my least favorite example of obliviousness has to do with the recent election here in the States. I’ll leave it at that.
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A bit political but I understand that. Thank you Denise.
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Charlee: “We cats highly recommend obliviousness. The dogs are completely oblivious to most things, not to mention easily distractible, and they seem pretty happy about it.”
Java Bean: “Ayyy, that is not tru—”
Charlee: “Look, a squirrel.”
Java Bean: “Squirrel?! Where?!?!” (bark bark bark bark)
Charlee: “See what I mea—”
Lulu: “Look, a bird.”
Charlee: “Bird?! Where?!?!” (chatter chatter chatter chatter)
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Ha ha that is funny dialogue. Obliviousness can be a blessing, a source of a calm and innocent mind, but I guess it is annoying when the oblivious try to lecture others, which dogs and cats never do. Well then we have obliviousness in dangerous situations, like traffic, which is an issue for dogs and cats, but we owners have to be non-oblivious for them.
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Some think what they know is the only thing to believe… especially here in Africa. People are so clingy to dogmatic cultural beliefs that don’t make any sense… and if you try to explain vividly how wrong they are, it’s like waging war with the, lol.
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I think it is a pretty universal problem. As Carl Sagan said in his book the “Demon Haunted World” :
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
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