وهم المعرفة: لماذا لا نفكر بمفردنا أبدًا؟

by Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach, أحمد م. أحمد (ترجمة)

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker

We all think we know more than we actually do.

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Audiobook, Neuroscience

287 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2017

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cînd a trăit oare ultimul om care a citit (sau ar fi putut citi) toate cărțile? Cu siguranță, acum mai bine de două mii de ani. Nici Plinius cel Bătrîn, nici Seneca nu mai puteau realiza această ispravă.

Numărul cărților crește mai repede decît viteza noastră de lectură. E un truism dureros. Pe zi ce trece, devenim tot mai ignoranți = cunoaștem un procent tot mai mic din totalitatea cărților:

„Ca indivizi, știm puține lucruri. Nu putem face mare lucru în această privință; sînt prea multe lucruri de știut” (p.263). Pentru acest motiv, oamenii s-au organizat în „comunități cognitive”. Thomas Kuhn le-a numit - cu un termen echivoc - „paradigme”.

Problema nu este că știm tot mai puțin, problema este că ignorăm cu desăvîrșire cît de ignoranți am devenit (luați fiecare în parte). În fond, orice individ trăiește cu iluzia că știe și pricepe absolut totul. Dar dacă este întrebat cum funcționează un telefon smart, cum se face că o simplă atingere a ecranului devine un like sub poza altuia, va ridica din umeri. Habar n-avem cum funcționează un banal „touch screen”. Tocmai iluzia cunoașterii ne împinge să avem întotdeauna opinii hotărîte, de nezdruncinat, asupra celor mai dificile chestiuni cu putință: ce este un virus, cum lucrează un vaccin pe bază de ARN mesager...

Știm, prin urmare, despre toate cîte nimic. În 2023, un Leonardo da Vinci nu mai este cu putință. Să vă spun cîte cărți cuprindea biblioteca lui Leonardo? Spun: 200 (două sute)! Unii istorici vorbesc de 150. N-ar fi rău să acceptăm că

„mintea omenească este deopotrivă genială și jalnică, sclipitoare și idioată... Și, totuși, sîntem în egală măsură capabili de cele mai remarcabile demonstrații de orgoliu nemăsurat și de nesăbuință. Toți sîntem predispuși să comitem erori, fiind cîteodată iraționali și adesea ignoranți” (p.11).

E limpede că „inteligența individuală e supraevaluată” (p.30). În fond, nici măcar nu știm ce este inteligența, nu sîntem în stare s-o definim și, cu atît mai puțin, s-o măsurăm. Speculațiile despre așa-numitul IQ sînt încă o dovadă a trufașei noastre ignoranțe. N-ar fi deloc inutil, așadar, dacă ne-am cultiva îndeosebi virtutea modestiei. În treacăt fie spus, din 2006, la Columbia University, studenții sînt invitați să participe la un curs despre „ignoranță” (p.264).

Pînă și homo sapiens în perioada de vînător-culegător știa mai multe decît noi. Nu avea nevoie de brichetă ca să facă un foc. Și nici de bucătari care să-i prepare un cotlet de antilopă. Își cosea singur straiele. Își făurea singur armele. Se descurca singur...

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging Power

The Knowledge Illusion is a demonstration of the thesis it articulates: "Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind...the hive mind." Each of us, as the 18th century philosopher Frederick Leibniz proposed, contributes to what we perceive and conceive as reality. In fact everyone who has ever existed contributes to that reality. We each contribute but none of us can know all that is known. Human knowledge floats in a world beyond human understanding.

Plato implies this same idea in the earliest Western philosophy. His eternal Forms are one way to express the inscrutable reality that is shared but not controlled by conscious beings. There is more than a hint of divinity in the potentially infinite power of this shared knowledge. We can only define it in the way that Anselm devised in the 12th Century, as that of which nothing greater can be conceived.

This reality is not necessarily true. In fact, it cannot be true because it is continuously changing as new minds emerge and affect other minds through communication. But the idea of an ultimate reality, truth, is essential in order for conscious beings to function in the world without going mad. Truth is that reality which has been constructed, or revealed if one happens to be religiously oriented, by the collective mind at the end of time. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce proposed just this definition of truth in the mid-19th Century.

In the 20th Century, Ludwig Wittgenstein recognised that language itself is the carrier of reality. We are born into it and cannot escape its independent power. Language manipulates us every time we use it. Through language, we progress (or not) but as Wittgenstein's contemporary, Martin Heidegger, quipped "Language speaks man" as much as man speaks language.

Sloman and Fernbach have given a modern sociological voice to this ancient philosophy. In an age of increasingly ideological politics, this voice is crucial. It is a voice that reminds us that no one has the right to claim a privileged view of reality, much less truth. It undercuts both the individualists by insisting on the social foundation of our existence and the collectivists by pointing out the necessity of individual experience. Taken seriously, this is a voice that continuously exposes power of any sort for what it is - coercion - and calls it into question.

[Satyajeet · Rating 4 out of 5]

It all begins with toilets.
Everyone (throughout the developed world!) is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toílet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?
In a study, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped.
(Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear!)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere.

People believe that they know way more than they actually do.

What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that:
“We can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins. One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor is that there’s ‘no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge’ and ‘those of other members’ of the group.”

So not just rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.
This is not necessarily bad. Our reliance on groupthink have us an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of (this) planet. The knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves. From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked extremely well for humans.
This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metal-working before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
But…the knowledge illusion certainly has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently, some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless conduct fierce debates about climate change (trump/trumpsters), while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate them on a map. Also, It gets much more complicated in the political domain. How could we then vest authority in voters and customers who are so ignorant and susceptible to manipulation? If Sloman and Fernbach are correct, providing future voters and customers with more and better facts would hardly solve the problem. (Try using facts and proofs to convince half-witted, ignorant and imbecile Trump and Trumspters that climate change is actually a thing (and many other similar things that are established facts), and not a propaganda by China)
Encouraging people to be more realistic about their ignorance is, as it sounds, very hard!
People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends, and self-confirming news-feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.

“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding”

It’s not really hard then to understand what (dafaq!) is happening around, especially in the current political scene in US and India.
Mass Psychology > Cognitive Dissonance > Confirmation Bias > Rise of Nationalism > Jingoism > Xenophobia >...Isolationism…

So what’s the alternative? Sloman and Fernbach don’t have a solution, and they’re well aware of the limits of their own understanding, and they know they don’t know the answer. In all likelihood, nobody knows...
If you like this book, you should probably club this with ‘The Enigma of Reason' by Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber'

[عبدالرحمن عقاب · Rating 4 out of 5]

يبحث الكتاب في محدودية معرفتنا كبشر. وتزايد هذه المحدودية مع تضخّم وتوسّع العلوم والمعارف. لا يعيب الكتاب علينا هذه المحدودية، ولا يدعونا إلى سذاجة الإحاطة بكلّ ما يحيط بنا من معارف وعلوم. ولكنّه ينبّهنا إلى أوهام المعرفة وأوهام الفهم التي نحيا فيها.
يطرح الكاتب هذه الأوهام كحالات معرفية لها أسبابها ودوافعها؛ و كذلك فوائدها. ولكنّه يسلّط الضوء على خطورتها وتمكّنها و سبل "تجاوزها" وليس "محوها".
و يعرض لما يمكن تسميته "تكيّف الإنسان المعرفي" مع هذا النقص الذي يعانيه كاعتماده على المعرفة الجمعية، وعلى المحيط خارجه، وعلى التكنولوجيا في تجسير تلك الهوة المعرفية.
على الرغم من فائدة هذه الآليات التكيّفية في تجاوز النقص إلّا أنّها بحدّ ذاتها تجعل الإنسان أكثر توّرطًا في غفلته عن "الجهل" الذي يجهله.
لم يعرض الكتاب لما يحيط بتلك الآليات التكيفية من مشاكل معرفية تؤدي إلى اختلالٍ في الفهم واعتلالٍ في الإدراك وما ينبني عليه لاحقًا.
وعلى الرغم مما يبدو على الكتاب من سمات التنظيم والترتيب إلّا أنّه يقع في التكرار والإطالة في كلّ فصوله.

[Nilesh Jasani · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Knowledge Illusion has a reasonably simple idea to start with. The authors repeat that numerous times. They meander in multiple directions but almost always come back with nothing but vague directives or known generalities. Despite the authors' own admission towards the end about the topics and discussions sounding commonplace (and trying to make a virtue out of the ordinary), a lack of anything substantially new leaves one highly disappointed.

An individual knows precious little on her own. She can achieve precious little on her own as well. An individual is always mightily mistaken in the estimation of own knowledge or capacity to do anything by ownself. Nearly a half the book is consumed in providing support to these seemingly obvious conclusions - and the proofs are sprinkled all through. Surrounding them, the authors try to weigh in on topics like

- Only teams or a collection of individuals have achieved almost everything worthwhile throughout the history of mankind. Almost all achievements that are ascribed to lone individuals like Martin Luther King or Einstein were largely because of the teams and circumstances surrounding them and would have been achieved even without those precise figures. A highly dubious claim which in the least required much more justification than simply an assertion.
- Separately the authors go on to warn that teams or a collection of individuals are prone to group thinking which is dangerous and should be avoided. An aside: such suggestions and directives on what all individuals should be following spring up without any preludes or forewarnings throughout.
- Best individuals do not make the best teams. Like in other cases, only generalities are provided if you want advises on what would result in a good team.
- Our dependence on technology is rising and dangerous. We must prepare for a life where technology may malfunction. (Don't ask how the book finds ways to topics like these)
- Machines cannot have or share the intentionality that humans have. An extremely naive view that goes something like this: only a human can have an intentionality or a desire like going from place A to place B via a sunset route. According to the book, machines are mere tools that would efficiently facilitate our intentionalities and can never replace humans because of the lack of intentionality. The book - in a span of a page or two - seems to cast aside the concepts like Singularity without ever recognising the simplest of possible objections like machines' (AI etc's) ability to unearth desires that we could be unaware of or create things that lead to completely new desires (social networking for instance) or even separate intentionality from objectives that machines can easily have without any interventions in the world we are headed to.
- A good section on how we become more aware of our lack of knowledge once primed through a series of questions that make us deliberate about the boundaries of our knowledge.
- The book also feels that we are likely to accept what we don't know when it comes to opinions more when we are provided with causal or consequential reasonings (only in a sufficient and not excessive quantity) and not explanatory rationales.
- We should rely on experts while keeping in mind that they too have their own biases. Still, many decisions cannot be left to crowds and should primarily rely on experts' opinions. To a degree, this is against the grain of the book's theme, but the contradiction is never felt by the authors to provide any explanations.
- Even a small saving every month could add up to a huge amount in a few decades' time!!

The book is likely to have appeal for those starting their reading journey in the fields of social sciences through pop culture books.

[Michael Perkins]

So what does a fact look like?

https://thebaffler.com/latest/what-do...

===============

“I really do believe that our attitudes are shaped much more by our social groups than they are by facts on the ground. We are not great reasoners. Most people don't like to think at all, or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly 70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold, as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact.”

-Sloman

=================

"We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience."

-Daniel Boorstin, American historian

==============

The deceptive power of "motivated reasoning".....

https://www.ft.com/content/13f627fb-e...

[Negar Afsharmanesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

این کتاب درباره کارکرد ذهنی ما انسان ها بود، در کل کتاب میاد کارکرد ذهن انسان درباره تفکر رو به صورت کامل توضیح میده این که مغز در بازه زمانی ای که ما داریم فکر میکنیم چطوری کار میکنه، همچنین این کتاب درباره توهمات و نتایج استفاده از اون هارو در افکار ما توضیح میده.

[Atila Iamarino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente livro sobre como pensamos com a ajuda de outras pessoas, em todos os aspectos. Do consenso entre cientistas, aos companheiros de trabalho, a professores e ao grupo que pertencemos. Como sabemos ou não das coisas e das ilusões e percalços de como pensamos. Um tanto que pode ser encontrado no The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, no A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age e no True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. Mesmo assim, consegue acrescentar e juntar bem as ideias.

Destaque para o episódio onde discutem como as pessoas se informam sobre ciência em temas como aquecimento global. E discutem como o modelo padrão, de que as pessoas simplesmente não sabem os conceitos e vão entender se explicarmos, não se aplica sempre. Quando aceitar um conceito implica em discordar ou ir contra a comunidade do qual as pessoas fazem parte – religiosa, política, acadêmica, etc. – elas abrem mão do conceito e não do grupo.

[Dan Graser · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoy Sloman and Fernbach's very engaging writing style and their deft use of helpful analogies to illustrate certain concepts, I really don't see much here that is original or genuinely thought-provoking. Maybe it's just me but unless you've never considered the fact that the things you use on a day-to-day basis are things you don't fully comprehend, have ever thought that your knowledge even within your specific field is not entirely housed within you but within a larger community, nor ever admitted to yourself how much ignorance of certain areas of life you genuinely operate under, then I don't think you're going to find this book particularly compelling. As I said, they are fine writers, there just doesn't seem to be much unique material here.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Our point is not that people are ignorant. It's that people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager. (8)

**********

"It's remarkable how easy it is to disabuse people of their illusion; you merely have to ask them for an explanation...We have also found that people experience the illusion not only with everyday objects but with just about everything: People overestimate their understanding of political issues like tax policy and foreign relations, of hot-button scientific topics like GMOs and climate change, and even of their own finances. We have been studying psychological phenomena for a long time and it is rare to come across one as robust as the illusion of understanding." (22)

**********

"Storytelling is our natural way of making causal sense of sequences of events. That's why we find stories everywhere...People see stories everywhere." (64)

**********

"Why do we so naturally tell stories that require reasoning about counterfactual worlds? Perhaps the main motivation is that it allows us to consider alternative courses of action...The ability to think counterfactually makes it possible to take both extraordinary and ordinary action. Some of humankind's greatest discoveries are due to counterfactual thought experiments." (65)

**********

"In a community of knowledge, what matters more than having knowledge is having access to knowledge." (124)

**********

"Public opinion is more extreme than people's understanding justifies. Americans who most strongly supported military intervention in the Ukraine in 2014 were the ones least able to identify the Ukraine's location on a map...Apparently, the fact that a strong majority of people has some preference does not mean that their opinion is informed. As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding. They often emerge in the absence of understanding..." (172)

**********

"This discussion yields a variety of lessons about our political culture. One is simply a confirmation of an obvious fact about our political discourse: It's remarkably shallow. Citizens, commentators, and politicians frequently take a stand before engaging in a serious analysis of the pros and the cons of proposed legislation. TV shows often masquerade as news but in fact consist of participants screaming at one another. It doesn't have to be this way. As individuals, we tend to be ignorant. But our airwaves are an important medium to provide correctives and give thoughtful experts a voice. We don't expect shows not to be biased; all reporting has some bias. but the public does deserve an analysis; public voices should consider the actual consequences of proposed policy and not just overwhelm us with slogans and spin. If we encountered more detailed analysis, it might influence our decision-making." (188)

**********

"Deciding on who has expertise and whether that expertise is biased is a difficult problem. But it's not insoluble. Indeed, society has many institutions in place to help. Experts come with recommendations that speak to their knowledge and credibility. They have histories that can be checked and reputations that can be assessed. Although information from the Internet does not come with a guarantee of accuracy, there is a fairly effective web industry that has developed to report clients' ratings of experts. As long as there are enough clients and the websites responsible for collecting and reporting the ratings are themselves credible, this can work well. Discovering the credibility of an expert is certainly a more manageable problem than asking everyone to become an expert and is, in fact, the only way to solve social problems." (189)

**********

"...direct democracy is vulnerable to manipulation just like other forms of governance.

"There are a lot of reasons to be critical of ballot measures voted on directly by citizenry. Our main concern is that such measures neglect the knowledge illusion. Individual citizens rarely know enough to make an informed decision about complex social policy even if they think they do. Giving a vote to every citizen can swamp the contribution of expertise to good judgment that the wisdom of crowds relies on." (190)

**********

"We have seen that a good way to reduce people's extremism and increase their intellectual humility is to ask them for an explanation of how a policy works. Unfortunately, the procedure does have a cost. Exposing people's illusions can upset them. We have found that asking someone to explain a policy that the person doesn't really understand does not improve our relationship with that person. Frequently, they no longer want to discuss the issue (and indeed, often they no longer want to talk to us).

"We had hoped that shattering the illusion of understanding would make people more curious and more open to new information about the topic at hand. This is not what we have found. If anything, people are less inclined to seek new information after finding out that they were wrong. Causal explanation is an effective way to shatter the illusion, but people don't like having their illusion shattered. In the words of Voltaire: 'Illusion is the first of all pleasures.' Shattering an illusion can cause people to disengage. People like to feel successful, not incompetent.

"A good leader must be able to help people realize their ignorance without making them feel stupid. This is not easy. One way is to demonstrate that everybody is ignorant, not just the person you're talking to. Ignorance has to do with how much you know, whereas being dumb is relative to other people. If everybody is ignorant, then no one is dumb.

"Leaders also have the responsibility to learn about their own ignorance and effectively take advantage of others' knowledge and skills. Strong leaders make use of the community of knowledge by surrounding themselves with people who have deep understanding of specific issues. More important, strong leaders listen to those experts. A leader who spends significant time collecting information and talking to others before making a decision can be seen as indecisive, weak, and lacking vision. A mature electorate is one that makes the effort to appreciate a leader who recognizes that the world is complex and hard to understand." (192-193)

**********

"A real education includes learning that you don't know certain things (a lot of things). Instead of looking in at the knowledge you do have, you learn to look out at the knowledge you don't have. To do this, you have to let go of some hubris; you have to accept that you don't know what you don't know. Learning what you don't know is just a matter of looking at the frontiers of your knowledge and wondering what is out there beyond the border. It's about asking why...

"As individuals, we know little. There's not too much we can do about that' there's too much to know. Obviously we can learn some facts and theories, and we can develop skills. But we also have to learn how to make use of others' knowledge and skills. In fact, that's the key to success, because the vast majority of knowledge and skills that we have access to reside in other people." (220-221)

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"Individuals don't make decisions by themselves. Other people formulate options for them, other people present those options, and other people give them advice. Moreover, people sometimes copy decisions that are made by others (for example, when stock market guru Warren Buffett makes a decision to buy a stock, many people copy him). We should be thinking about decision-making from a communal perspective. The knowledge required for decision-making is not merely in individuals' heads but depends heavily on the community of knowledge." (241)

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"The University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein have developed a philosophy that they call libertarian paternalism. Although the name is a mouthful, the idea is simply and compelling. The main observation is that people don't always make the best possible decisions' they don't always choose the option that makes it most likely that they will achieve their own goals...

"The libertarian paternalist believes that behavioral science can be made a force for good, that it can be used to improve our decision-making. Behavioral science can be used to identify the reasons we make decisions that we regreat and change the process of decision-making so that better decisions are made in the future. Such changes are referred to as nudges. The idea is that behavioral science can be used to nudge decisions to make them better in the sense that they are more aligned with what decision makers actually want...A nudge for organ donation is to change the law so that everyone is an organ donor by default. You can choose not to be, but that requires a little action...Making people opt out rather than opt in increases enrollment in a variety of plans...

"Nudges are libertarian in the sense that they don't reduce people's ability to choose. Nobody is preventing you from eating a large pizza or from being an organ donor or not. But they are paternalistic in the sense that somebody else decides which options are going to be encouraged. Somebody else has put the pizza later in the cafeteria line so that you're more likely to choose the salad. The main argument for this kind of paternalism is that the choice has to be made one way or another. Something has to be earlier in the cafeteria line, so why not make it the item that people feel most attracted to when they are not in the heart of the moment, when they can think dispassionately about what the best food options are?

"The big lesson of the nudge approach is that it is easier and more effective to change the environment than it is to change the person. And once we understand what quirks of cognition drive behavior, we can design the environment so that those quirks help us instead of hurt us." (248-249)

[Sattar Shayesteh Far · Rating 4 out of 5]

آنکس که بداند و بخواهد که بداند
خود را به بلندای سعادت برساند
آنکس که بداند و بداند که بداند
اسب شرف از گنبد گردون بجهاند
آنکس که بداند و نداند که بداند
با کوزه ی آب است ولی تشنه بماند
آنکس که نداند و بداند که نداند
لنگان خرک خویش به مقصد برساند
آنکس که نداند و بخواهد که بداند
جان و تن خود را ز جهالت برهاند
آنکس که نداند و نداند که نداند
در جهل مرکب ابدالدهر بماند
آنکس که نداند و نخواهد که بداند
حیف است چنین جانوری زنده بماند

خلاصه کل کتاب به زبان شیوای فارسی

[Kotryna · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about ignorance, focusing on a lack of personal mindfulness in making everyday decisions and the appraisal of hive-mentality (trusting communal knowledge). The main concept of the book is based on all of us thinking we know more than we do and an importance of trusting expertise of a wider community instead of trying to solve every problem individually.

In my opinion, the book is a bit too descriptive; it presents a case study after a case study of the same ideas without a deeper analysis or conclusion; authors don't offer much of an advice on how to be more focused and mindful, nor do they explore different cultures beyond the western world (I would argue, that the hive-mentality is something worth investigating in a context of Asia and other places); and there is almost no mention of individual responsibility and a negative side of hive-mentality (beyond one paragraph in the end of the book, which felt more like ticking off the box rather than making a serious point).

Some chapters better than others, and the second half of the book more interesting than the first one, which felt like a very long and repetitive introduction. Didn't experience any deeply enlightening moments while reading this one, except of the last two pages opening the door to the good side of living in an illusion of knowledge – these final thoughts by authors seemed like an idea for a better book than the one they've written.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider this a 'must read' for anyone wanting to understand the polarization of today's society inflamed by social media. My reason for reading this is to gain insight for work strategies since the modern approach is to deny what those truly trained in an area have to say. What I learned is that none of us know as much as we think we do (the knowledge illusion). That's not necessarily a bad thing except when we don't realize it. The other thing is (and really this is true--look at your own interactions) people really don't want to be inundated with facts. The challenge is making information that is complex understandable in very basic bits. Obviously there are no easy answers but understanding the problem and being offered some approaches is very helpful. Also this book addresses recognizing the knowledge we rely on which is outside of own heads--this is the why we never think alone part. These are important topics. The authors have done a great job organizing and presenting the material.

[عمر الحمادي · Rating 4 out of 5]

لا يستطيع الناس أن يكونوا خبراء في كل شيء، في مجتمع المعرفة علينا تقاسم الأدوار، إذا قرر المجتمع توفير الرعاية الصحية فإنه يجب ترك الأمر للمختصين من أجل تحديد الطريقة الأكثر كفاءة في ذلك، الخبراء يساعدون المجتمع على فهم الخيارات المتاحة وعواقبها، ويجب أن يكون الخبراء خاضعين لآلية تراقب قراراتهم من أجل منع حصول التحيز لأي سبب كان.

[Tiago F · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. While still about general cognitive biases and illusions, it goes well beyond many of the typical books about it.

Its main premise is that knowledge, at least the vast majority of it, isn't in our heads per se, but rather our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. Despite this, though, we feel that it's part of our own knowledge. Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth”: People believe that they know way more than they actually do. Best exemplified by how little we understand everyday devices, like toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks.

The typical narrative of human bias is put at the individual, but Sloman and Fernbach rightful put it in the social context as well, much forgotten yet very needed. Very well written, with helpful analogies and always supported by scientific evidence.

[Asif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cognitive science is the study of human intelligence, the search for the magic ingredients that allow people to perceive. Steven Sloman focuses on the impact of community, and society in the creation or enforcement of knowledge or illusion of knowledge. Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth”: People believe that they know way more than they actually do. Best exemplified by how little we understand everyday devices, like toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks.

This book has three central themes: ignorance, the illusion of understanding, and the community of knowledge. We have no illusion that the lessons we can draw from our discussion are simple. Those lessons are decidedly not to reduce ignorance, live happily within your community, and dispel all illusions. On the contrary, ignorance is inevitable, happiness is often in the eye of the beholder, and illusions have their place. The point of this book is not that people are ignorant. It's that people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meagre.

We are living in a complex sophisticated world. Our life is facilitated by a community of people having expertise in specific domains. As an individual, we can only scratch the surface of the true complexity of the world. We rely heavily on others. This reliance on a complex sophisticated system has resulted in greater ignorance of our knowledge and understanding.

People generally have a habit of overestimating their understanding of how things work. We all suffer, to a greater extent or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meagre. The illusion of explanatory depth gets created as a result of our dependence of others & overestimation of our understanding.

Before trying to explain something, people feel they have a reasonable level of understanding, after explaining, they don’t. Storing details is often unnecessary to act effectively, a broad picture is generally all we need. Storing details or going for too much details can be counterproductive.

It's remarkable how easy it is to disabuse people of their illusion; you merely have to ask them for an explanation...We have also found that people experience the illusion not only with everyday objects but with just about everything: People overestimate their understanding of political issues like tax policy and foreign relations, of hot-button scientific topics like GMOs and climate change, and even of their own finances.

We rely on abstract knowledge, vague and unanalysed. We’ve all seen the exceptions—people who cherish detail and love to talk about it at great length, sometimes in fascinating ways. And we all have domains in which we are experts,

Donald Rumsfeld was the U.S. secretary of defense under both presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. One of his claims to fame was to distinguish different kinds of not knowing:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we
know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There
are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Known unknowns can be handled. It might be hard, but at least it is clear what to prepare for.

So people know less than everything (surprise, surprise). In fact, we know a lot less. We know just enough to get by. Because our knowledge is limited, our understanding of how things change is correspondingly limited

The Two Causal Reasoners Inside Us :
Intuition and Deliberation are different approaches or responses toward a specific task, challenge or issue. Intuitions are personal, they reside in our heads. Deliberation involves conscious reflection.

This distinction between two different kinds of thought can be found throughout classical and modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. Daniel Kahneman celebrated the distinction in his book Thinking,Fast and Slow. This is a distinction thousands of years old; it goes by a variety of names in cognitive science. For example, the two systems of reasoning have been referred to as associative versus rule-based thinking or simply as System 1 versus System 2. We’ll refer to it as the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Intuition leads to one conclusion, but deliberation makes us hesitate.

The knowledge illusion occurs because we live in a community of knowledge and we fail to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads from the knowledge outside of it. We think the knowledge we have about how things work sits inside our skulls when in fact we’re drawing a lot of it from the environment and from other people.

The knowledge illusion is the flip side of what economists call the curse of knowledge. When we know about something, we find it hard to imagine that someone else doesn’t know it. If we tap out a tune, we’re sometimes shocked that others don’t recognise it. It seems so obvious; after all, we can hear it in our heads. Because we live inside a hive mind, relying heavily on others and the environment to store our knowledge, most of what is in our heads are quite superficial. We can get away with that superficiality most of the time because other people don’t expect us to know more; after all, their knowledge is superficial too. We get by because a division of cognitive labor exists that divides responsibility for different aspects of knowledge across a community.

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A convincing, enjoyable and insightful account of the "illusion of knowledge" by two of the researchers that developed the idea. Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that knowledge is social, that humans have unparalleled ability to learn from each other, cooperate, and take advantage of the division of labor (an argument that was fleshed out in somewhat more detail and different directions in the outstanding The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich).

This all works because we also suffer from the "illusion of knowledge" where we think we know more about how things work than we do. Sloman and Fernbach go through a set of experiments they have run asking people how much they understand about zippers, toilets, bicycles and the like. Then asking them to explain in detail how they worked. And finally asking again how well they understood. As you might guess, they barely knew how any of them worked (and it turns out I have a lot to learn too!), and only realized that after having to try to explain them.

In fact, we can only understand the world because we grossly simplify (he uses the Borges story of "Funes the the Memorious" to illustrate, someone who can remember everything but can't classify the same dog as the same dog because he sees it at different angles at different times). We also do this to understand history (e.g., reducing scientific discoveries and historical moments to individual great people, like Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King, rather than understanding the social nature of their knowledge and their impact).

Sloman and Fernbach also have a useful and interesting discussion of the differences between AI and humans centering on human thought being about understanding causation and intentions.

The last chapters of the book are various degrees of successful as they attempt to apply the ideas in the book to domains like politics, education, financial literacy and more, pointing out how understanding our ignorance can help us. The problem is that we all need to trust experts (and they have a strong argument for that which appealed to me, no surprise) but also need to know which experts to trust and how to ask hard questions without being overconfident in our knowledge etc. There is no one simple recipe for that and they basically admit that. But some of the ideas are good, like the research showing that in politics people will be better able to moderate their positions if they are forced to explain the causal logic of their idea not just come up with ideas to defend it. And how making more debates consequentialist instead of moral will help elucidate and bridge gaps.

Ultimately, Sloman and Fernbach is another excellent entry in a set of books that increasingly emphasize humans as socially conscious, hive minds, who form their political and other beliefs based largely on their social groups, and that rational maximization is not really possible when the maximization problems are way beyond the ability of just about anyone to do on their own--plus you don't have an incentive to do them.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best part of illusions is how few of us ever recognize that we live in them. We all have an over-inflated confidence in our understanding. Our grasp of reality is extremely superficial, but this isn't entirely a bad thing, despite how much social commentators lament the ignorance of the average person the reality is that the human mind was never designed to act in isolation. Instead the true genius of the human brain is how it is optimally designed to work in concert with other minds which in turn creates a larger social intelligence. Unlike computers that can only process data, the human brain is an intentionality machine that devotes much of its processing power to figuring out the intentions of others. This is important because it is what allows humans to form complex social groups. It's like each brain is designed to be "plugged" into other human brains. That is where humans become truly remarkable and excel, in groups and teams. Homo-sapiens have gone from stone tools to the moon and it has all been because of collaboration. No single human being could have achieved it, but together we can.

[radioparesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

خیلی کتاب مفیدی بود. یه جورایی مثل‌ خوندن یه مقاله بود. در مورد اینکه ای کاش بفهمیم که همه چیز رو نمی دونیم و‌این لزوما اشکالی نداره،چیزی که هزارها سال قبل فهمیده بودیم اما الان فراموش کردیم.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

We think we know much more than we do. In fact, most of us do not know much about even how every day things work. The authors gave 2 simple examples: the zip and the toilet bowl. First they asked how much people understood them. Then they asked them to actually explain it, and most of them have great difficulties doing so. When finally asked again how much they understood them, the professed lower understanding.

So how can we do this? We can do this because our knowledge lies in the totality of human society. We do not need to know how things work as long as they do. We don't need to understand how integrated circuits work to use our iphones. Any of us know only a little bit, but together we are wise.

So we need to know more about what we do not know. Talking to people, listening to viewpoints different from our own helps.

However, big strides are always made by people with big dreams, a.k.a. people with the. invest knowledge illusion. That's what propels us to the moon, explore new worlds, and make new discoveries.

I think we need to do a bit of both, be careful but dream big, but in different parts of our lives.

[Oleksandr Golovatyi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Кращі нотатки та цитати з книги:

"... парадокс людства. Людський розум одночасно геніальний і жалюгідний, блискучий та ідіотичний."

"... ми часто не усвідомлюємо, як мало ми розуміємо. В результаті ми часто буваємо занадто самовпевнені - переконані у власній правоті щодо речей, про які насправді мало що знаємо."

Тренуй Свій Розум та Інтелект. (промо-лінк)

"Ми всі більшою чи меншою мірою страждаємо на ілюзію розуміння - ілюзію, що ми розуміємо, як речі працюють, хоча насправді наше розуміння мізерне."

"Просто вражає, який фрагментарним і неглибоким є наше розуміння знайомих нам предметів - навіть предметів, з якими ми стикаємось постійно"

"Розум - здатність витягати з потоку даних, що надходить до наших органів чуття, глибшу, абстрактнішу інформацію."

"Ключове значення розуму для розуміння ілюзії знання: зберігання деталей часто непотрібне для ефективної дії; загальна картина - це зазвичай усе, що нам треба."

"Причиново-наслідкове мислення - це наша спроба використати знання причиново-наслідкових механізмів для того, щоб зрозуміти зміни. Воно допомагає нам робити припущення про те, що станеться в майбутньому, через обмірковування того, яким чином певні механізми перетворять певні причини на певні наслідки."

"... ми постійно робимо висновки, але ці висновки не грунтуються на логіці з підручників - вони грунтуються на логіці причиново-наслідкових зв'язків." !!

"Замість мислити в категоріях пропозиційної логіки - логіки, яка каже нам, чи певне твердження істинне, чи ні, - люди мислять у категоріях каузальної логіки, логіки причиново-наслідкових механізмів" !!!

"Замість придушити неправильну інтиїтивну відповідь і трохи порозважати, щоб дійти правильної відповіді, люди просто вибовкують інтуїтивну відповідь - перше, що спало на думку."

"Надзвичайно роздумливих людей тягне до деталей, і цим вони відрізняються від більшості."

"Можливо, ми такою великою мірою покладаємося на десяткову систему числення саме тому, що маємо десять пальців. Відзначте, що діти часто рахують за допомогою пальців."

"У спільноті знань важливіше не мати знання, а мати доступ до знань."

"Велика частина людського розуміння складається просто з усвідомлення того, що знання десь там є. Глибоке розуміння зазвичай складається зі знання того, де це знайти. Тільки справжні ерудити оперують знаннями, що зберігаються в їхній пам'яті."

"Френк Кайл (відкрив ілюзію глибини пояснення)"

"ілюзії пояснювальної глибини: мені здається, що я розумію речі краще, ніж я їх насправді розумію, тому що я включаю розуміння інших людей у свою оцінку мого власного розуміння" !!!

"Сам акт пошуку в інтернеті і віднайдення відповідей на один тип запитань підсилив в учасників відчуття того, що вони знають відповіді на всі запитання, включно з тими, відповідей на які вони не шукали."

"найменший шматочок знань викликає в нас таке відчуття, ніби ми експерти"

"факти про людське невігластво становлять аргумент на користь представницької демократії, а не прямої демократії. Ми вибираємо представників. Ці представники повинні мати час і здатність знайти експертні знання, що допоможуть приймати хороші рішення."

"Сильні лідери застосовують силу спільноти знань, оточуючи себе людьми, які мають глибоке розуміння конкретних тем. Що ще важливіше, сильні лідери дослухаються до тих експертів."

"інтелект перестає бути здатністю людини доходити висновків і розв'язувати задачі - він стає мірою того, який внесок людина зробила в процес висновування та розв'язування задач, яким зайнята група. Для цього залучаються не лише індивідуальні спроможності до обробки інформації на кшталт хорошої пам'яті та швидких центрів здійснення обробки. До цього належатиме здатність розуміти кут погляду інших людей, ефективно чергуватися, розуміти емоційні реакції і слухати. Інтелект стає значно ширшим феноменом, якщо його розуміти в термінах спільноти знань."

"collective intelligence - колективний інтелект"

"успіх групи не є в першу чергу функцією інтелекту окремих її членів. Він визначається тим, наскільки добре вони працюють разом" !!!

"Люди створені насамперед для дії, а не для слухання лекцій, операцій із символами чи запам'ятовування фактів."

"Ілюзія розуміння виникає тому, що люди плутають розуміння зі знайомістю або впізнаванням."

"Навіть якщо ми запам'ятали текст, це не гарантія того, що ми його зрозуміли. Щоб зрозуміти текст, треба попрацювати над ним уважно і старанно, докладаючи зусиль, щоб у ньому розібратись. Треба подумати про намір автора... Багато учнів плутають вивчення з легким читанням."

"люди поверховіші, ніж їм здається, і що ми страждаємо від ілюзії знання"

"ми підвладні ілюзії знання, тому що плутаємо те, що знають експерти, з тим, що ми знаємо самі. Той факт, що я маю доступ до знань когось іншого, змушує мене почуватись так, ніби я вже знаю, про що кажу."

"треба визнати, що ви не знаєте того, чого ви не знаєте."

"для однієї публікації сьогодні в середньому потрібні зусилля і експертні знання майже 6 науковців. Як і в багатьох інших галузях, наукова спільнота функціонує завдяки командній роботі." !!!

"ефект Даннинга-Крюгера: ті, хто вміє щось найгірше, переоцінюють свої вміння найбільше. Цей ефект можна спостерігати, якщо дати групі людей певне завдання, а потім запитати їх, наскільки добре, на їхню думку, вони з тим завданням упоралися. Ті, хто показав погані результати, переоціюють свою успішність; ті, хто показав потужні результати, свою успішність часто недооцінюють."

"Розум схований у спільноті, а не в окремих людях. Тож процедури прийняття рішень, в яких було дано місце мудрості спільноти, даватимуть кращі результати з більшою імовірністью, ніж процедури, в яких вирішальну роль відіграватиме відносне невігластво окремих одинаків. Сильний лідер - це такий лідер, якиз знає, як надихнути спільноту і скористатися наявними у них знаннями, а також вміє делегувати відповідальність тим, хто має найільше спеціальних знань."

[Nikhil Krishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reasonably good read, even though it deliberately focusses on one premise (We don't know as much as we do by ourselves) above all else. While I agree with all the points made, I think that it could have been better paced out and written in a more compelling way. The essence of it is solid, it deserves that much praise.

[Dbaguti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read, conceptually simple yet deep. Nice.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

One takeaway to remember: getting people to write out a causal explanation of a topic they have strong feelings about often leads to them moderating the extremity of their position on the matter because it forces them to recognize how little they really understand about a topic. This could be useful in the future as a person who is EXTREMELY interested in reducing political extremity! (Ha! I kill me!). But seriously, let's do whatever is necessary to reduce extremist political positioning.

I noticed I got all the science and math quizzes that this book says most people got wrong correct.. I guess that means that I'm one of those explanation seeking people instead of an explanation avoiding person, with the advantages and disadvantages thereof, as described by the authors. Lots of times reading this, I was thinking really? No one was able to describe global warming? I mean, ok, I can't really explain how a zipper works (OR CAN I? A small metal device has two halves of interlinking smaller, identical metal pieces that are pressed, equidistantant from each other, along the edges of two pieces of fabric. The device has a loose handle piece on it, which the user can then use to pull the device up, forcing the two sets of metal pieces to interlink. -- I could go on, but ok, I admit it's very time consuming and difficult to explain how a zipper works) BUT I think I could explain what global warming is, if only echoed from An Inconvenient Truth. I'm not claiming expertise but just, you know, a responsible level of knowledge. A Jeopardy-lover's amount of understanding. Not nothing of substance, which is apparently what you get if you ask practically anybody.

I really like how, toward the end of this book, the authors say they want people to, when they finish the book, think that the information is obvious because that's what happens with good ideas. I mean, yeah, I personally already knew about the Dunning-Kruger Effect and I already read the book You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself, which covers a little bit of similar ground, but I have to recognize that generally, people do not understand that they understand so little and rely so heavily on the knowledge of others, confusing it with our own, and the ideas in this book are not, in fact, already widely understood and acknowledged. So, I'm pro-this book. I wish that the people who more badly need to read it were more apt to read books like this.

[Laurent Franckx · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the concluding chapter of "The knowledge illusion", the authors argue that really novel ideas often seem obvious once they are accepted. Without false modesty, they try to convince the reader that the central idea of their book indeed falls into this category.
As far as I am concerned, they may well be right. And the reader is thus warned that he may find everything that follows trivial.
The key message is that people are not just incredible ignorant (even when they are very smart), but that they are orders of magnitude more ignorant that they realize. The key reasons for this discrepancy are: (a) there is infinitely more to know than even the smartest people in the world can remember (and even less understand) (b) people usually don't feel the practical consequences of this ignorance because they can rely on the cumulative knowledge of all other people. If you're not convinced, just try to explain how a zipper or a toilet works.
So you think this is trivial? Well, once you read it, it is rather obvious, but the implications of this idea are far reaching.
I'll give you just a few to consider:
• Given that knowledge is distributed over specialists, what is most important in teams? The brilliance of their individual members or the capacity of the teams to work together and to get the most out of the (hopefully complementary) competences of the individual members?
• If it is impossible to have anything more than a very superficial understanding of most issues, should schools emphasize learning as many facts as possible or (you guess it) cooperating and sharing with others?
• If people's thinking is embedded in a community of people, how can you convince them of mistaken views if these views are shared by their peer group? (Hint: not by confronting them with objective information or rational arguments).
So no, this is not just another clone of "Thinking fast and slow" or "Predictably Irrational" (even if there is some overlap). Through its emphasis on the social aspects of knowledge, this book really does stand out from the crowd. Its style is engaging without being shallow, and most of the argumentation is well grounded in academic research.
This book is required reading for educators, students (especially for the smartest amongst them) and for anyone who needs to be reminded how little he know and how much he depends on the knowledge of innumerable anonymous others. For all of us, basically.

[Alla Komarova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Змусити людину покроково пояснити, як працює змив в унітазі, чи до чого призведе заборона абортів, чи що змінить підняття податку на 5% - єдиний спосіб бодай здвинути її з впертості, нібито вона у чомусь розбирається.

Можливість вчитися у інших у колективі більш важлива характеристика аніж власні показники IQ. Саме тому швидкість дії людини не залежить від знань у її голові, а визначається виключно тим, до яких саме знань та із якою швидкістю вона здатна дотягнутися.

Знання не містяться у голові, вони розпорошені у тілі, колективі та техніці. Але оскільки ми плутаємо власні знання із тими, до яких маємо доступ, рівень агресивного невігластва та помилкової впевненості у власних силах зростає чи не у геометричній прогресії.

Зменшити радикалізованість настроїв здатне лише причинове пояснення, але як тільки людина відчуває, що чогось не знає, її потяг до того, аби заповнити прогалини, різко зменшується. Додати сюди неможливість щось пояснити навіть за допомогою причинового пояснення, коли мова йде про культурні нашарування та сакральність поглядів, маємо на виході масу виборців зеленського.

Чи є вихід із цього зачарованого кола? Так, є. Автори вбачають його у лібертаріанському патерналізмі: у м’якому підштовхуванні до правильних рішень. Для розуміння: це коли у студентських їдальнях, аби підвищити рівень споживання корисного та зменшити некорисне, заміть заборонити продаж морозива чи розвісити скрізь рекламу «їж овочі, вони корисні», банально переставили морозиво у непрозорі ящики, а овочі поклали на стрічки раніше за бургери. Все. Вибір в студентів все одно є, його не позбавили – не брати броколі, дійти до бургера, знайти морозиво у непрозорій тарі, - але такий вибір вимагає трішки більше напруження і тому він одразу стає непопулярний.

Це той випадок, коли нонфікшн книга на 200% корисна й цінніша за свою ціну. Це той випадок, коли нонфікшн книга ще довго не застаріє і перечитувати її можна декілька разів. Це той випадок, коли це дійсно ВІДМІННА нонфікшн книга, я не втомлююсь це повторювати.

[Sarah Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, I'm taking a class that gave us a number of books to choose from to write an essay on how it connects to the subject matter we're discussing (i.e. Information Communities). I decided to go with The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. I won't post my boring essay, but I'll just give a basic description of the book and a short rundown of my thoughts.

In the Knowledge Illusion the authors are making the point that since human brains evolved to filter out most information, much of what we think we "know" is actually external information gathered from our knowledge community (friends, family, local experts [e.g. plumbers], teachers, books, and the internet.) “We fail to draw an accurate line between what is inside and outside our heads. And we fail because there is no sharp line. So we frequently don’t know what we don’t know” (15).

They give many examples throughout and one such example was that of the zipper. Participants were asked to rate on a scale how well they understood how zippers work. Next, they were asked to explain how zippers work in as much detail as possible. Last, they were asked to once again rate how well they understood zippers. Not surprisingly, participants rated their knowledge lower the second time around. The authors refer to this throughout as an Illusion of Understanding. They explain that humans in general are guilty of this because it's simply how our brains evolved. We seamlessly pull information from our external environment (knowledge community) and blend it with our internal environment (our mind).

They go into a lot more than this and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in topics of cognitive science, psychology, and/or politics. Only downside is that I felt like the writing was clunky at times. They also become a bit repetitive and I found myself sometimes skimming different examples that were making the same points.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

There were some very interesting ideas that were explored in this. It gives you a greater appreciation for what you don't know. The book definitely got me to assess my own knowledge differently.

Here are some pretty cool quotes from the book that really stood out to me,

"Our point is not that people are ignorant. It’s that people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager."

"Members of the community are critically dependent on each other. No one is an island; no one knows it all; collaborative learning is necessary for survival. This interdependence promotes an atmosphere of joint responsibility, mutual respect, and a sense of personal and group identity."

However this was a required reading for my class so that kind of took the fun out of reading it. I also felt that there were parts in this that were overly emphasized or that seemed to drag on and weren't that interesting. Which is pretty ironic considering that the book talks about how we pick and choose what we find to be useful information and tend to skim other things.

[LaanSiBB]

Most of us think we know more than we actually do. We think this because we ignore complexity and believe that our brain, like a computer, is designed to store information. This isn’t the case. Rather, our brains evolved to work with other brains and to engage in collaborative activities. Indeed, it’s our ability to divide cognitive labor and share intentionality that’s led to our species’s success. So, when thinking about intelligence, we should take into account people’s collaborative aptitude, and we’d do well to encourage more collaboration – not just in school, but in society as a whole.

Don’t let the illusion of explanatory depth drain your bank account.
People tend to think they understand how money works: the less you pay, the more you’ll have. But here’s the thing: if you take out a loan, the more you pay now, the less you’ll end up paying in the long run. Imagine you take out a $10,000 loan with an annual interest rate of 12 percent. If you decide to pay $110 per month, it’ll take more than 20 years before you’re debt free (and you’ll pay more in interest). If you pay $120 per month, you’ll be in the clear in 15 years, and you won’t have to pay as much interest. So remember that, sometimes, spending more actually means spending less.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be required reading. One of my favorite excerpts:

"Most people just want the best health care for the most people at the most affordable price. The national conversation should be about how to achieve that.

But such a conversation would be technical and boring. So politicians and interest groups make it about sacred values. One side asks whether the government should be making decisions about our health care, prompting their audience to think about the importance of limited government. The other side asks whether everybody in the county deserves decent health care, prompting an examination of the value of generosity and preventing harm to others.

Both sides are missing the point. We all have roughly similar basic values. We want to be healthy, we want others to be healthy, and we want doctors and other medical professionals to be compensated, but we don't want to pay too much.

The health care debate shouldn't be about basic values because in most people's minds basic values aren't the issue. The issue is the best way to achieve the best outcomes."