The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

by Steven Sloman

When people search for a word, for example, we don’t consider one word at a time sequentially. Instead, we search our entire lexicon—our mental dictionary—simultaneously, and the word we’re looking for usually rises to the top. That’s not the kind of computation that von Neumann and Turing had in mind in the early days of computer science and cognitive science.

Gould’s observation that events seem inevitable in retrospect is a deep insight about human ignorance.

Just as people don’t think only associatively (as Pavlov thought we do), people do not reason via logical deduction. We reason by causal analysis.

Humans are the most complex and powerful species ever, not just because of what happens in individual brains, but because of how communities of brains work together.

My ability to act doesn’t depend on the knowledge that happens to be in my head at a given moment; it depends on what knowledge I can access when I need it.

Intelligent technology is not replacing people so much as connecting them. The web is demonstrating that real superintelligence resides in the community.

Finding reasons is pretty easy. You can justify your position on cap and trade by appealing to your belief that it will help the environment. You can make this claim without appreciating how shallow your understanding of cap and trade is. In stark contrast, when you are asked to produce a causal explanation, you are forced to confront the gaps in your knowledge.

It’s an old politician’s ploy. The secret that people who are practiced in the art of persuasion have learned over millennia is that when an attitude is based on a sacred value, consequences don’t matter.

People live in communities of knowledge, and to make the community work, there needs to be a division of cognitive labor. For knowledge to be shared within a community, the role of expert on any given issue must be filled by someone credible and informed.

Experts cannot tell communities what they want; that is something that communities have to decide for themselves. But experts can help communities understand what options are available and what the consequences are of taking one or another option.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Science seems to make progress not just because a genius comes along but also because conditions are right for particular discoveries. The right background theories have been formulated and the right data have been collected.

Fluid intelligence is what we’re thinking when we say someone is “smart.” The person has the ability to come to conclusions quickly whatever the topic and is able to figure new things out. Crystallized intelligence refers to how much information one has at one’s disposal stored in memory. It includes the size of one’s vocabulary and one’s access to general knowledge.

To perform most tasks, you want people who make different contributions. To run a company, you need some people who are cautious

and others who are risk takers, some who are good with numbers and others who are good with people.

Whether we’re talking about teams of doctors, mechanics, researchers, or designers, it is the group that creates the final product, not any one individual. And it is the final product that counts.

Intelligence is not a property of an individual; it’s a property of a team. The person who can solve hard math problems can certainly make a contribution, but so can the person who can manage a group’s dynamics or the person who can remember the details of an important encounter.

We also suffer from the knowledge illusion because we confuse what experts know with what we ourselves know. The fact that I can access someone else’s knowledge makes me feel like I already know what I’m talking about.

Since 2006, a course entitled Ignorance has been taught at Columbia University. Guest scientists are invited to speak about what they don’t know. The scientists come from a variety of disciplines to discuss what “they would like to know, what they think is critical to know, how they might get to know it, what will happen if they do find this or that thing out, what might happen if they don’t.” The course focuses on all that is not in the textbooks and thus guides students to think about what is unknown and what could be known.

Communications are written by experts. Those experts feel like everyone must understand what they write because the expert does. This is the curse of knowledge. It is a result of participation in the community of knowledge—the failure to separate what is in one’s own head from what is in the heads of others.

Rai stones are large, doughnut-shaped pieces of limestone that the Yapese people of the small island of Yap in Micronesia use as currency. The stones can be really big, up to twelve feet across, and can weigh several tons. Some are so big that when ownership changes, the new owner doesn’t move the stone. It remains in the same spot, but everyone accepts that it now belongs to the new owner. In one story, a large rai stone fell out of a canoe and sunk to the seafloor. The stone was never seen again, but it retained its value and continued to be traded. The Yapese couldn’t see it, but reasoned that it must still be there. To Western ears, this story sounds odd. How can a hunk of stone at the bottom of the sea have value? But the odd thing is not the economy of the Yapese. It is the nature of economies in general. Up until the 1930s our economy was also based on hunks of rock that we couldn’t see. Our rocks were made of gold instead of limestone and hidden in Fort Knox instead of at the bottom of the sea, but still, the parallel is obvious.

Money gets its value from the communal belief that it has value; its worth depends on a social contract.

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.

When academics encounter a new idea that doesn’t conform to their preconceptions, there’s often a sequence of three reactions: first dismiss, then reject, and finally declare it obvious.

It’s because the ideas are obvious only when you think about them. When you don’t, when you go about your daily life and are not conscious of them, you think very differently. People tend to live in an illusion of understanding, and we focus on individuals—their power, talents, skills, and achievements—instead of appreciating that we are citizens of a community of knowledge.

Expertise means that you have skills as well as knowledge about what constitutes being skilled. Ignorance means you have neither. This pairing explains what is commonly known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, that those who perform the worst overrate their own skills the most.

Intelligence resides in the community and not in any individual.