How to know what you don't know?

Posted by Ivo Danihelka on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ivo Danihelka
Published on 2010-05-10T17:16:14Z Indexed on 2010/05/10 17:24 UTC
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learning

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self-learning

Is there a way how to recognize that you don't know something?

For example, I had some hard realizations:

I didn't know that criticism isn't a good way to teach your friends. I realized that after reading How to Win Friends & Influence People.
I didn't know about the fundamental needed for an indutive bias in machine learning. If I have read Mitchell's Machine Learning book early, I would know it. I haven't found it mentioned in other books and papers.

Sorry if the question is too generic. The question could also mean: How to know that you are missing something important about your programming language?

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