This Is Water: How To Understand People (A Little Bit)
In 1806, US entrepreneur Frederic Tudor sailed to tropical Martinique with a big scheme to sell ice to the locals.
Sounds like a solid business plan.
Didn’t work.
The islanders found the product to be nothing other than a curiosity. Having never experienced a cold drink, they could not get why ice had any such value.
They left Tudor’s cargo to melt away — unappreciated and unsold.
Unknown unknowns: the Totality Illusion
The moral: people’s finite ‘conceptual horizons’ constrain how they make sense of the world.
If you don’t have the concept of a ‘cold drink’, you don’t understand the value of ice for that purpose.
It’s hard to sense a failure to recognize a concept when you lack that concept in the first place. These are things that we do not know, that we don’t know: unknown unknowns.
In fact, what each individual knows is merely a narrow slice of the concepts that humanity has developed to comprehend the world we inhabit.
Unfortunately, people often incorrectly assume that they are experiencing the world in full.
