Why information alone is not enough

Introduction

Claude: If I want to talk about the ignorant, I'll need to distinguish between how to help the person who is ignorant of their own ignorance, the person who denies their ignorance and says "I know everything, I don't need to learn more", the person who is too busy to even realise they're ignorant, and the person who is anxious, who knows they're ignorant but has no access to knowledge.

[Opening theme]

Gwen: In this second episode, I'm still joined by Claude Garcia, an ecologist specialising in tropical forest management and co-author of the article "Choices We Make in Times of Crisis." Today, we're taking a closer look at the archetype of the ignorant and proposing ways to help them through the door. If the idea of ushering ignorant people through doors sounds strange to you, I'd refer you back to episode 1, in which Claude introduces the 4-door system, a framework for understanding people we tend to judge as irrational in the climate debate.

Discussion

A theory of change

Claude: If those of you listening have stayed with us this far, I hope you're comfortably seated and have been finding this interesting. I'm going to try to suddenly give you a much broader view. Because if you've understood, there were these four doors, and therefore five states: the ignorant, the sceptics, the busy, the worried, and the architects. What I'm presenting is a theory of change. It's about how we change a society, how we change a company, how I change the world, and how I change myself. It's a theory of change.

At the heart of the theory of change, there is a change. I shift archetypes. I move from ignorant to sceptic, or from ignorant to busy, or from worried to architect. So it's a theory that refers to itself, it's self-referential. That's a big word for saying I can apply it to itself. I can be ignorant of my own ignorance, or I can be anxious about my ignorance and desperately seek ways to acquire knowledge. I can deny being busy, or on the contrary be too busy to even realise I'm busy, because after all I've got my Excel files to send before the end of the day. And so in fact it's a theory that applies to itself, and that suddenly gives us, well, you'll see, 4 times 4, we've got 16 different types of people, and that gives us enormous richness when it comes to analysing situations.

If I want to talk about ignorant people, I'll need to distinguish between how to help the person who is ignorant of their ignorance, the person who denies their ignorance and says "I know everything, I don't need to learn more," the person who is too busy to realise they're ignorant, and the person who is anxious, who is aware of their ignorance but has no access to knowledge. Those are going to be four completely different kinds of conversations. And the person who is an architect of ignorance, what that actually means is that they're pulling themselves out of ignorance and will be able to go through the door.

Gwen: So in the end, they're the easiest to get through the door, because they're already trying.

The two ways out of ignorance

Claude: It's the simplest. The first door is the simplest. There are two ways, broadly speaking, to go through it. Either the information exists somewhere, and someone brings it to you. That could be a teacher, an authority figure, an influencer. "Hey, have you heard about..." That's the simplest way. Humans are very good at this. So I leave ignorance when someone brings me information. But it's possible that some of us are discoverers. And that's a different process. I didn't know there was a disease, I see strange things, I scratch my head, I don't understand, I set up experimental processes and I realise there's something new. All discoveries went through this.

So those are two very different processes.

Gwen: So most scientists engaged in a research process fall into that archetype.

Claude: Now I'm going to make a terrible joke that really annoys all my colleagues. It's the finders who have this problem. That is, the researchers, by definition, don't have it, the finders do. I think it was de Gaulle who made this joke, and he didn't do us any favours with that quote. But someone who discovers new information and shares it with the world, that's someone who opens doors, who has themselves emerged from ignorance and uses that to share it around them. So the whole scientific structure of data communication is designed to open the first door.

And for a long time, researchers have been banging their heads against the wall saying "but I showed you, I know vaccines are effective, but why..." It's because we hadn't yet understood that there were other doors to go through, and that putting one more report on the table isn't enough to open the other doors. Information only opens the first door.

Gwen: There are topics where the door of ignorance is currently closed. It's impossible to open unless people work together to produce the knowledge needed to go through it, so that others can follow. There have to be at least a few people who opened that door for the first time, so that others can pass through it.

Claude: Yes, someone has to open it for the first time on any new subject. And the problem, as we now know, is that the further we advance in knowledge, the more we also expand the domain of ignorance. Those are other philosophical questions about epistemology.

So, the first door. It's either discovery or the transmission of information. The media, schools, they serve to open this first door, and that works pretty well. Observation, if I walk around with my eyes open, curiosity, that's the way to open this first door. It's the simplest way. You still have to be present. If I walk around with my phone in my face, I'm not likely to discover what's around me. Attention plays a role in this. So the first door is fascinating, the whole edifice of science and education is built to open it.

Gwen: So ultimately this first door and this first archetype, the ignorant who is trying to emerge from their ignorance, all you need to do is bring them information, data. Then the second one, who comes right after, who is a bit harder to convince, who's that?

Claude: The person who ignores their ignorance, they're not at all prepared to listen. So they'll only be more surprised. "I didn't even know I didn't know." But that's easy. So again, this person is probably not actively looking.

Gwen: So you just need to bring them the information.

Claude: Right. So information brought to the person who is ignorant of their own ignorance, and information brought to the person who is consciously ignorant and anxious about it, both will work.

The first will be completely surprised by the information, so they're not really in demand of it. The second is in demand, so by definition they're looking. Information brought to the others won't necessarily have the same effect. It will all depend on who brings the information and through what channel it arrives. The person who denies their ignorance doesn't even want to listen, and the person who is busy isn't interested in listening. So for those who don't want to listen and those who aren't interested because they feel they have better things to do, everything depends on who sends the message and through what channel they receive the information.

Gwen: It's the messenger problem.

Claude: And it's the messenger who makes it possible for the information to be heard, not even accepted, just heard.

It's a bit like the case you mentioned with Ronaldo's water bottle. By changing the messenger, suddenly people who didn't care receive the message. And it's not that they didn't care, it's that they didn't even know it was a problem to drink sugary drinks. That's the definition of ignorance: it's not on their radar at all, at all. So it hits them: "Oh, really? Why is Ronaldo doing that? Ah, right."

So bringing the information will satisfy those who didn't expect it at all but aren't predisposed against it, and those who are looking for information. And how the information arrives will allow you to reach those who deny being ignorant and those who are satisfied with their ignorance.

So that's how we deal with this first category, it's clearly the simplest.

Gwen: OK, so if the message isn't getting through to begin with, you need to change the messenger. You need to try to find a messenger who will be heard by the people you're talking to.

Claude: Exactly. That covers the first archetype. And it means you don't have to exhaust yourself. Listen, we illustrated this in a way we hadn't planned, but when I was surprised that you'd read the article, I was illustrating exactly this. The information has been published since 2021. Who read the scientific paper?

You and two or three other people.

Gwen: Yes, so I'm typically one of those people who were looking for the information...

Claude: Who were worried about it...

Gwen: And who stumbled across you, and thought "oh great, I'm going to go and pester this person regularly with various projects and try to extract as much knowledge as possible" [laughs].

Claude: Absolutely [laughs].

We only see what we are prepared to see

Gwen: Are there things you should typically not do that would be counterproductive?

Claude: If there are, I'm not aware of them, because in a state of ignorance... we're hungry for information. The brain is designed to capture information. But we also know that we only see what we've been prepared to see. There are famous examples, famous experiments.

Do you know the gorilla basketball example? In sociology, it's a classic. You ask people to count, there's a team of basketball players in white and red passing a ball, and you ask people to count how many times the players in the white team pass the ball. And so the person is extremely attentive, focused, concentrated on the ball. And then in the middle of the scene, someone dressed as a gorilla walks in, beats their chest, goes "ooh ooh," and walks out. And when you ask the people who were counting whether they saw anything unusual, they say no, everything was fine, people were just passing the ball. In other words, they don't see a gorilla beating its chest right in front of them, because their attention was focused elsewhere. That's relevant for opening the first door. And so it's possible to focus someone's attention on something, or on the contrary to distract them. Magicians do this all the time.

Gwen: For example, constantly crying about budget catastrophe.

Claude: I have absolutely no idea who you're talking about [laughs].

Gwen: Just off the top of my head.

Claude: But you realise, we're talking completely off the cuff here. We prepared this episode a little but we didn't script it at all. And we're using the analytical framework to deconstruct our own conversation from earlier, or even current events. Maybe that illustrates, in the best possible way, the power of this tool for understanding and analysing the situations we discuss.

Gwen: You tell me what you think, but I'd been wondering while preparing this episode whether it might be interesting to try to find an example of going through all four doors from one end of the spectrum to the other. The guinea pig I had to hand was myself. So I tried to find a topic on which I had gone through all the doors, and I thought it might be interesting to analyse.

Claude: Let's go, let's go!

Gwen: The most telling subject I came up with was feminism. I really started at the other end of the spectrum, completely, and I think I went through the doors successively, and maybe even passed through and came back and passed through again, to finally arrive at the other end of the spectrum and be truly more of an architect. It might be interesting to try to unpack what made me stay ignorant for quite a long time.

Claude: Absolutely.

Gwen: In hindsight, we can reflect and see ourselves quite clearly through these various doors. It allows us to analyse a bit what made me stay behind this particular door, and what made me eventually cross to the other side.

Going through the doors: the example of feminism

Claude: And if you remember it, it's because there was a strong emotional imprint with each crossing of a door. That's a hypothesis I'm putting forward, I don't know how to prove it, I don't know if it's provable, but I bet that every time we cross one of these doors, there's an emotional imprint and therefore a memorial imprint that gets stamped. I remember when I saw, I remember when I understood, I remember when I was moved.

Gwen: And I remember very clearly, I don't know if it was truly an epiphany, but it was a kind of pivotal moment, and a messenger. I was at the very beginning of secondary school. I had a history and geography teacher who did a kind of demonstration using a Christmas toy catalogue, and he pulled out the pages of toys for girls and the pages of toys for boys, the pink pages on one side, the blue pages on the other, and all the domestic toys for girls. And I remember seeing that and thinking, it's really unbelievable, I'd never paid attention to that.

Claude: He drew your attention, he directed your gaze.

Gwen: Yeah. And I had this thought, I had this feeling of great betrayal. I'd learned about feminism as something historical, something from the past: there had been a feminist revolution and now it was fine [laughs], now it was over.

Claude: [laughs] Welcome to the 21st century...

Gwen: Exactly. And so I remember this kind of epiphany of "oh right, we were kind of fooled, weren't we." That was the beginning of a little bit of reflection on the subject, but I didn't go through the door right away. It lit something up a little, but I was also pretty young, I think. I'd maybe started to become receptive to information at that point.

Whereas before that, if I go back a little further,

Claude: Go ahead, go ahead...

Gwen: I have another memory, a little older, really from nursery school. I remember being a child who swore a lot, and people would always say "that's not nice coming from a little girl." That phrase really had the gift of annoying me.

Claude: [laughs] That marked you.

Gwen: And I think that's where the first seed of "that's not fair," a sense of injustice, must have been planted.

Claude: That really resonates with me, and I think it will resonate with the people listening, because these are always intimate journeys that stay with us. But you're bringing up something I rarely get to discuss. Because the middle doors, the door of beliefs and the door of values, bear on things that constitute who we are and our identity. It's what I believe I understand about the world and what I consider important, what is good and so on, those are values. So the first door is what I believe about the world, and the second is what I want from the world, that's values. In fact, that's what constitutes my identity.

And yet I was built, my identity was built, shaped by my experiences, by my surroundings, by my parents and so on. Up to around the age of 13, I believe we can directly intervene in the construction of beliefs and values. That's where teachers matter, where school matters, where parents and the family environment are foundational. From about 14 onwards, a direct intervention on values and beliefs will meet resistance, because we'll start to have our own identity and want to defend it in some way. I've never had the chance to discuss this with child psychologists and so on. I'd love to have that conversation. But we can see clearly that authority figures who tell you what's good and what isn't, it's hard to explain to someone my age "this is good, this is not good, and what you used to think needs to change." That's not going to happen just like that.

But I'm getting ahead of the conversations we'll have later.

Gwen: Yes, those are other doors to go through.

What I found really interesting in what you said about age is that I was about twelve years old when I had this experience with the toy catalogue. I could have, at that point, immediately begun my journey and gradually moved through the doors. That's not at all what happened. What happened is that I decided, well, I told myself "OK, we've been lied to a bit." There are gender roles, and the female gender role doesn't suit me. So I thought, well, I'll switch teams.

I completely distanced myself from what it meant to be a woman, not really consciously, but I told myself, fine, it's OK, I'll decide that I'm, well, that I'll go to the other team because it's more interesting. And so during those years, the adolescent years where you defend your construction, your identity,

Claude: You're building yourself, exactly.

Gwen: I was really in this kind of... ultimately of completely internalised sexism. "Women are annoying anyway, they're this, they're not interesting, but not me." And so I stayed in that for quite a while. And maybe you can help me figure out what door that corresponds to. The moment I started to change was when I started meeting women who were not at all like that stereotype, and so reality came to confront my beliefs. I started to think, actually, this doesn't work!

Claude: It doesn't hold up, what I used to believe.

Gwen: This whole thing doesn't work!

Claude: Now I love the direction you're opening up for the discussion. I'd just like to point out that we're no longer talking about climate and biodiversity, but about questions of diversity and gender. And this proves, it's what we said at the start, the theory is formulated in the article as a response to climate denial, but it's much broader than that. When I presented it at a conference, I announced it with a lot of arrogance, well, actually a lot of humility, I believe it's a universal theory, meaning it applies to every societal transformation. And so I think it's perfectly suited to discussing questions of gender and identity.

Gwen: I don't remember if this is mentioned in the article, but I've heard it said several times that you're not ignorant or an architect or anything as a person, it's always applied to a specific topic.

Claude: Exactly. It's always applied to a specific subject, a specific problem. And I'll give an example, I'm worried about the question of biodiversity, but for a long time I was completely ignorant of feminist issues, for example.

Gwen: In the same way, I became worried about feminist issues much sooner than about questions of racism, for example. Simply because you're not living that experience yourself, so you encounter it much later.

Claude: And you see, we can go even one step further, and we'll discuss this later, because being an architect requires my energy and my resources, and there won't be any left for other things, other battles. And so if I throw myself completely into being an architect, on all other questions I'll be busy. It won't be up to me, I won't be able to. And so that's interesting too. There are balances to be struck on that side of things.

Gwen: And that's where we see the very significant influence of context. You were talking earlier about personal responsibility. This allows us to broaden the view a little, to the fact that there are all kinds of surrounding factors that will keep us behind a door. If I go back to my earlier example of my past self who had internalised sexism, I didn't internalise sexism of my own accord. It's that it was present everywhere in behaviour, and I think that's what made me absorb it. I made it part of my value system more or less by default, not consciously, anyway.

Claude: You asked me a question. I don't think we'll be able to answer it if we stay in the category of the ignorant. Because you asked me a question: what state were you in, or what made you step back, or be confronted with the world? I think you were already in the other categories at that point. You'd pulled yourself out of ignorance.