I’m fascinated by the sports analogy and the concept of unknowing.

I’ve befriended an elite level athlete. (I’m forced to take as a premise that my life is absurd as a first principle after rationally reflecting on all the improbable i’ve survived.)

I asked them, “If you knew the outcome, would the game still be worth playing?”

They said it would, actually. The end isn’t what matters. It’s how you get there.

Similarly, i disagree that it is not rationally possible to unknow information one has been exposed to. Dissociation, in my understanding, is a rational protective measure of a mind to an irrationally dangerous scenario such as extended and/or extreme trauma.

Dissociation is closely related to the well documented phenomenon that trauma survivors are the most suggestible cohort regarding hypnosis.

Absent these two premises it would make no sense how a person can rationally unknow information.

But, well, what do i know. I’m just a hacker.

In that vein there are multiple persons in the hacker community that go by nyms rather than their actual name. Adjacent to the hacker community are several other communities where nyms are de rigour. I know the legal names of certain individuals that prefer that information not be disclosed, for example. And thanks to the ability to dissociate, that information is deliberately inaccessible to me unless the very rare occasion pops up where I need it, such as a call for bail.

In other words, compartmentalization, which is merely another form dissociation takes. In my case, it is a conscious and conscientious effort to not know what i allegedly know, like i even know anything.

In the vein of the article, knowing someone by a preferred name except when a legal name needs to be known is a highly rational form of seeming irrationality.

It’s a kosher bacon cheeseburger because the bacon is tempeh, the burger is soya, the cheese is made cashews. (I’m just a hacker, as i mentioned before, not a Talmudic scholar, and every analogy breaks down at a certain point.)