In my favorite summary of it, Malcolm Gladwell ( author of 'Blink' and 'Tipping Point' ) says:
Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don't know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it's just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists--literally--written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.
Gawande's idea is a very practical one. Checklists are very useful. I don't even do something simple like going to the grocery store, much less something complicated like doing taxes or planning a vacation or building a foundation for a building without one. Or playing a game of go.
The underlying idea of why checklists are necessary is even more important, IMHO. The contrast of ignorance vs ineptitude describes much of the modern world. It occurred to me as I reviewed the things that I do on a daily basis, and realized that, for any task more complex than using a microwave or digging a post hole, there is lots of information out there about how to do it better. Even the seemingly simple things like driving a car have multiple books. The more complex the task, the more there is. For serious tasks, you can bury yourself in data that would take you a lifetime to sort through.
I think that ignorance vs ineptitude also describes the point at which most of us find go to be hard, and maybe also the point at which we stall in our quest to get stronger. In other words, 'stalling' may be the point where we must make the change from learning more to rearranging and cataloging what we know.
I recall that hundreds of years ago, the Japanese houses would hoard go knowledge. Now, one would need competence in at least four languages and 36 hours in a day just to keep up with what is available. So a different way of phrasing it is when you suffer from ignorance, you are a classical go player; when from inepitude, a modern one.
