this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Being perfectly fine not knowing something and not caring to get answers aka willful ignorance.
Why don't you want to know?!!! How is it that the thought proceding "I don't know" is not immediately "but I want to find out"?! We can't know everything but we have so many answers at our fingertips. As if you don't want to absorb as much of it as you can?!
It immediately makes me think that the person I am speaking to is not worth my time. Chances are, the more they're willfully ignorant about, the more likely they'll also not care about how their actions affect others. Major red flag for me.
Edit: I should've mentioned I was thinking of particular types of situations where the person has the mentality of "oh man, I don't know, it'd be cool to know that" and proceeds to not do anything about it or when they are regurgitating something they heard on foxnews with such blind conviction without bothering to look into it further
I understand the sentiment, but there are things not worth knowing. I don't care who was drafted in 1987 by the San Diego NFL team. I don't care about the extras who appear in the 1957 film Witness for the Prosecution. I don't care what you had for breakfast. My point is, I think your issue is less about curiosity, but of values. People who don't value the things you care about, or worse, don't even value the things they purport to care about.
You're right. Sorry, I should've mentioned I was thinking of particular types of situations where the person has the mentality of "oh man, I don't know, it'd be cool to know that" and proceeds to not do anything about it.
Or like you say, having strong convictions about something but not having done the reading themselves. I don't mind listening to opposing opinions if they actually believe them and didn't just regugitate something they heard on foxnews.
I think in most cases, curiosity is what drove human development to such heights. And to just stop it at "oh yeah, I dunno hey" takes a very particular type of person... A type of person I just can't understand!
Thanks for pointing that out though, I hadn't quite fully figured out how to articulate what I was trying to say!
My effort in any given day is limited, and gone are the days of high school/college where I would just stay up all night because I found some random rabbit hole of trivia I wanted to know more about. Like yeah, there's plenty of things I would gladly download to my brain given an instantaneous button to do so, but a much smaller list of things I actually consider worth the effort, even if I'm interested
They're satisfied with the picture of the world in their heads, and looking into things might prove it wrong and then they'd need to go through the effort of changing it, and that's a hassle, so they don't. And then you do, and make them do work, which is annoying.
It's why "don't shoot the messenger" needs to be a proverb instead of just common sense.
It depends on what the subject is. Learning things requires energy, which we don't have an unlimited supply of. If you ask me a question about, say, Hotwheels toys, I'm gonna tell you I don't know the answer, and I do not care nearly enough about Hotwheels to put time and effort into researching anything other than surface-level facts about them. This type of ignorance is fine by me, I'd rather deal with a person who knows they don't know anything about a subject and doesn't care about it than someone who knows little yet cares deeply about it.
And with how easy it is to look things up, it could just take moments.
There's a lot of people who are actively avoiding being wrong though - they know they'll be wrong, so they never want to look into anything.
There's also people who are willfully ignorant about things that are too taxing for their mental health, such as the war in Ukraine. Some people think it's very important that everyone knows the details on what is happening, but it might do more personal damage than good on individual who is already struggling with stress, depression, anxiety etc.
The only time when willful ignorance is bad, in my book, is
A: They're being willfully ignorant about an essential skill that they need in order to make everyone's day go smoother
B: They're willfully ignorant about something but somehow still give as much of a shit about it as experts on the topic. These people are the worst.