Adam Savage of MythBusters gave the keynote address at the DevLearn Conference. I was lucky enough to be speaking there as well, and his talk was certainly a highlight. It was beautiful and funny and thoroughly inspiring, from start to finish. One idea really stuck out: the concept of being “not even wrong.”
Apparently, while researching for a segment on whether swimming in syrup is as fast as swimming in water, Adam had some questions on viscosity. He learned there was a whole field of study called Rheology — “the science of deformation and flow of matter.” Of course there was an international society for it, where physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, and mathematicians were busily advancing their field. So Adam found the number for the society’s President (which wasn’t hard), and called him up to get some help.
The man on the other end of the phone started yelling at him:
“Really?!? You’re calling ME for this? You don’t — I can’t — You’re NOT EVEN wrong! You ASPIRE to be in the VICINITY of wrong, but you’ve got a helluva lot more to learn before you can even ask a QUESTION that would tell you just how WRONG you are!”
Poor Adam didn’t know that there was no absolute measurement for viscosity, or that there were so many different kinds of viscosity one could measure, or which one applied to his televised experiment.
It doesn’t matter how smart we are in general — we didn’t know enough to even be wrong about this seemingly simple subject, because we didn’t really know anything about it. Most importantly, we didn’t consider that the subject might be inherently complex. Why would we? In such a situation, our obviously intelligent-sounding questions just sound like crazytalk to those in the know.
Like asking a 2-year-old to do calculus for a college professor, the resulting scribblings aren’t even approaching the wrong answer. Both sides are completely incomprehensible to the other. There can be no relevant discussion or even a basic transmission of ideas.
How often does this happen to us without realizing it?
And what do we do about it? What next — when confronted by someone whose fundamental understanding is so absent or malformed that they’re not even wrong?