The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in marketing, advertising, problem solving, and creative thinking.

The Power of Ignorance: How creative solutions emerge when we admit what we don’t know is by Dave Trott, an advertising creative director and copywriter from the United Kingdom.

In his latest book, Trott cites philosophers from China and Japan:

The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn’t know he doesn’t know

– Lao Tzu.

In the West they only respect experts. But the expert mind is the closed mind.

– Shunryu Suzuki

Books by both of these writers are in the TU Library collection.

The Power of Ignorance cautions creative thinkers against believing that if they reach a stage of professional achievement, that means they are experts and every thought that enters their head must have value.

Instead, we should keep an attitude of eternal students, always learning about new things and recognizing when we are ignorant as the first step to understanding. and formulating, innovations.

The noun ignorance derives from a Latin term meaning not knowing. People lacking wisdom or knowledge are sometimes called ignoramuses.

In a previous book by Trott, Creative Blindness: and how to cure it, also owned by the TU Library, the author also alerts readers to being deceived by anyone who appears to be extremely self-confident:

Confidence can be very convincing, which is why ignorant people can be so persuasive.

Trott argues that to realize how effective our work is, it helps to look at it as it will be appreciated by others.

For example, if we are planning to upload a poster or announcement on Facebook, there is no point in studying it for a long time to see if it is good.

Instead, we should slide a printout of the poster across our desks as quickly as possible to see if we remember anything, since Facebook ads are mostly seen for less than one second by most viewers.

Here are some more observations about ignorance by authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

• Any wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend.

Traditional Arabic proverb

• The truest characters of ignorance

Are vanity, and pride, and annoyance.

Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663-1664).

• Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni (1842)

• To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: Or, The Two Nations (1845)

• Kremlin himself was distinguished for ignorance, for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: Or, The Two Nations (1845)

• Ignorance never settles a question.

Benjamin Disraeli, speech, House of Commons (May 14, 1866).

• Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

• Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. The first requisite for this is that we become aware of men’s necessary ignorance of much that helps him to achieve his aims.

Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey (6 January 1816)

• Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

• Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them; but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest testimonies of judgment that I know.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays

• Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

Will Rogers

• Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945)

• The common curse of mankind,—folly and ignorance.

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

• Ignorance is no argument.

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

• There are many ignoramuses in the palace.

Ancient Sumerian proverb, c. 5000 BCE.

• I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I, spoken by Lady Bracknell (1895).

• Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past. Therefore we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity. Once we have more knowledge (light) about each other, we will stop condemning each other and a United front will be brought about.

Malcolm X: The Man and his Times

• I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

Cicero

• Nothing is so dangerous as an ignorant friend; a wise enemy is worth more.

Jean de La Fontaine, Fables

• The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

• It is better to be unborn than untaught: for ignorance is the root of misfortune.

Plato.

• The more we study, we the more discover our ignorance.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Mark Twain

• There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Isaac Asimov

• The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.

Napoleon Bonaparte

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)