There’s a certain class of problems that kind of fascinates me and I’d describe them as not knowing what you don’t know. You could say it’s involuntary ignorance or unawareness of common knowledge. It’s something that you don’t know, that everybody else seems to know, and because everybody else seems to know it they assume you couldn’t possibly not know it. If I had to list the features of the problem it’d look like this:
- Very hard to discover the solution
- Once you discover the solution, fixing the problem is usually trivial
- The solutions are always obvious in retrospect
- The solutions are already widely known by others
I have several examples of this happening in my life. The first and best example is when I was 10. In school I was failing history tests but doing well on every other subject. A poor grade would be something like < 75/100. I was getting scores in the 20s/100. Basically bottom 1st percentile stuff. The school was calling my parents, suggesting maybe I should be moved to a different school. The school and my parents IQ tested me three times. I underwent a battery of tests, such as neurological, vision, hearing, psychological, etc.
Apparently many thousands of dollars were spent trying to find the underlying problem. The solution came from a child psychologist who figured out that I didn’t understand the concept of studying. I didn’t know I could or was supposed to prepare for these tests by repeatedly reviewing the material so I would memorize it. Nobody had told me about it and I had never done it before. I guess the subject never came up in conversations with friends, or if it did maybe I thought studying meant something different. I really have no idea how other people figured this out on their own. Naturally the solution was to get a tutor and my next score on these tests was 96/100. This issue was immediately resolved and never happened again.
A more relatable and general example is someone who mispronounces words because he learned it on his own by reading.
There’s really no doubt that this kind of problem must be generally pervasive in every functional area of life. Social, academic, professional, health, romantic, etc. For some people, the difference in between success and mediocrity may come down to unawareness of some common knowledge that plays an important functional role.
I don’t really have firm recommendations on detecting of fixing these sorts of problems. The most I can say is that in my experience the people most likely to point out these common-sense solutions are either mentors, trusted friends, or hired consultants. They will generally provide you honest feedback that others wouldn’t for risk of offending you.