Nutrition. It’s a willful ignorance. And I don’t mean I shrug off eating unhealthy foods. I mean I have not educated myself on what’s healthy and what’s not. And I don’t know what foods contain what scary chemicals or fat or cholesterol or sugar or salt or whatever. I just don’t care. For one, it gets me out of grocery shopping or cooking. For another, as long as my doctor says I don’t have to worry, I won’t.
Yep, was married to her, and that was part of the problem. I did take a valuable lesson from it though, never assume that just because people don’t get something doesn’t make them stupid.
I’ll go with music. I played piano for several years as a child and could read the music and find the right keys, but there are certain fundamental musical concepts that are like describing the color theory to a color-blind person.
For example, beats. People will listen to a song and say “That’s a 4/4 beat.” I will only know it’s a 4/4 beat by looking at the sheet music and saying “yep, it says so right here.” I can’t understand how you know the beat from listening to it. When I took piano they kept telling me to use a metronome to keep time, but relating the length of this note to that clicking thing… I just don’t see how that helps me time it right.
In a past thread, people were discussing the audience clapping on the wrong beat of a song being played live, so the drummer skipped a beat to make the audience’s timing right. I still don’t get why there is a wrong beat to clap on and I have a lot of trouble detecting that a beat was skipped even when I’m told where in the YouTube video it happened.
And then there are octaves. Some people apparently think notes and octaves mean something, as if a C note in one octave had any relation to a C note in another octave. To me, they’re just two different notes. I kind of think octaves are there just because we’d run out of letters without them.
This is not just a matter of “I haven’t learned that yet.” I’m just not perceiving what I’m told is there.
+2 Pts. Fortunately I have a woman who is ignorant of my ignorance. (Saved to file for posterity.)
OT: I Think willful ignorance often allows you to truly focus on what is truly important to you/what you are good at. It’s the whole be good at one thing or suck at everything mentality.
Sports
Musical composition
Intergalactic Politics
Fluid dynamics
Pokemon (or any other Japanese game or cartoon)
Medical things
Cricket is a complete mystery.
Bridge, although I do like that they say “no Trump” a lot.
Third level calculus; or second level, even.
Astrophysics: even when it’s explained at the five-year-old level, it baffles me
Basketball, beyond this-ball-goes-through-this-hoop. That’s almost sacrilege for a tall Hoosier like me.
Music theory, harmony, chords. I know a lot about music, but I don’t know how it works.
Any history outside the US.
Computers; code, programs, all that internal stuff I can’t see.
The stuff I don’t know about philosophy and religion would fill libraries, and I guess it does.
Same with me. It is such a baffling game that I have attempted at various times to read simplified explanations of the rules and have even watched some video clips, not because I care, but just out of spite. Every time I have done that, I have actually gone backwards in understanding it at all. None of it makes the slightest bit of sense to me at even the most superficial level. There is a lot that I don’t know about most foreign sports but I can understand the very basics of all of them except for Cricket - it remains a complete enigma.
Funny you should say those particular things because:
I used to play in club tournaments
I once took piano lessons and learned to read music
The former president of Latvia, Vaira Freiberga, lived in my neighborhood and, although I never met her, I had occasion once to talk to her husband Imants Freibergs. I couldn’t tell the name of any other politician there, nor any in Lithuania or Estonia (or most other places for that matter.
I am totally ignorant of:
History of the dark ages
Network TV
The rules of polo
Sports other than baseball.
MMORPGs, because I am afraid I will become an addict if I cross that line.
Sci-fi lit, and I say this as someone with a degree in English with quite a lot of general knowledge of literature, who should have a passing knowledge of such a popular genre, especially since I like sci-fi films.
African languages. While I, for example, do not speak any Asian language, unless one counts Hebrew, I know about the language history of Asia, and the relationships among languages, and what are the official languages of which countries. I know this about Europe, including actually speaking some European languages, and about the Americas (even a smattering of the relationships of Native American languages), but I can’t even name the countries in Africa that have English as an official language, although I know there are many.
Apple products. I am IBM/Microsoft all the way, and can’t use an Mac anything to save my life. I even stumble around iTunes, and I’ve used that for years.
Gender identity. Sorry but I just-don’t-understand. If someone says “I am a man”, what does that mean, exactly? That they identify as a man? But what are they identifying with? Its not their individual sex, it’s not their cultural experiences, what is it? I cannot understand what it means to “feel” like a man?
Often, its asked of people who don’t understand transgenderism to imagine how they’d feel if they woke up and suddenly found themselves in the body of a person of their opposite sex. But this is a flawed comparison because transgendered people have always felt themselves to be the gender they identify with; there is no sudden terror of a new body.
I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral
When someone talks about the benefits of rolling over into a Roth IRA, or about mutual funds, or equities, etc., they might as well be speaking Klingon.
I have this odd obsession with world finance and currency markets, have read multiple books on it, and STILL don’t understand how they work. I take comfort in that I have been told neither do the people that run those markets!
At Trivia Nights TV, post 2000 popular music, and literature questions completely bamboozle me.
I used to play basketball in High School yet I’m completely confused when commentators start discussing different basketball positions and strategy. I have no clue why there is a “big” and “small” game; now, maybe part of the problem is I played in the early 80s but still I feel stupid for not knowing better. This from a guy who understands football, hockey, soccer and baseball like the back of his hand!
I also struggle to understand why newer social media is so popular; I’m a Twitter and Facebook guy who doesn’t get the appeal of Instagram or Snapchat. And trust me, I’ve tried to get on board with both!
It is not possible to live in the 21st century and know less than I do about cars and driving them.
This made me laugh, because while I am a beer and wine drinker, I rarely drink liquor. And yet somehow I seem to know most of the answers to even the liquor-related questions. I have no idea how that’s happened.
While I, like most folks, have vast areas of ignorance, the ones that bother me the most are lack of higher math knowledge (those equations are just as foreign to me as something written in Chinese), an inability to understand anything but the most basic computer programming (which has held me back in my career the last 10 years or so), and most areas of business.
I’m married to a former stockbroker, so I have a pretty good understanding of markets and investments. But … how a company figures out how much to charge for a product is like black magic to me. How do they do that? I occasionally do freelance and/or contract work and when I have to state how much I want for a particular product, I basically just pull something out of my ass - it’s based on how interesting and/or educational the work will be to me, and how much I like the person I am doing it for (can you tell I have a day job?). Pretty sure that’s not how businesses actually do that stuff. I’ve had people ask me why I don’t go freelance full-time and that’s why. I’d crash and burn in a year.
I’m ignorant of most modern communication devices. I don’t own a cellphone, and have only a landline. I don’t know how to use the fancy phones that take video or pictures. I don’t know how to text, or use Twitter.
:smack: It was you I was following!!! :eek:
Most things.
Sports.
Reality Show Celebrities.
Computer programming.
Angling.
Cars.
Knitting.
Hip Hop Music.