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It’s remarkable how easy it is to disabuse people of their illusion; you merely have to ask them for an explanation. And this is true of more than zippers.
How can we get around, sound knowledgeable, and take ourselves seriously while understanding only a tiny fraction of what there is to know? The answer is that we do so by living a lie. We ignore complexity by overestimating how much we know about how things work, by living life in the belief that we know how things work even when we don’t. We tell ourselves that we understand what’s going on, that our opinions are justified by our knowledge, and that our actions are grounded in justified beliefs even though they are not.
if arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly . . . have won very great rewards . . . But as things are . . . they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness . . . What argument would remold such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by argument the traits that have long since been incorporated in the character.
To get the right answer, the intuitive answer must be suppressed and you must do a little calculation. Most people don’t bother.
Rather than suppressing the incorrect intuitive answer and engaging in the little bit of deliberation to figure out the right answer, people just blurt out the intuitive answer, the first answer to pop to mind.
The brain and the body and the external environment all work together to remember, reason, and make decisions. The knowledge is spread through the system, beyond just the brain.
Thought does not take place on a stage inside the brain. Thought uses knowledge in the brain, the body, and the world more generally to support intelligent action. In other words, the mind is not in the brain. Rather, the brain is in the mind.
Airliners are flown by committees including the pilot, the copilot, air traffic controllers, and the sophisticated automated flight systems that play a huge part in managing modern aircraft.
When new ideas emerge, it’s generally hard to attribute them to any one person because many people in a meeting supply a little crucial piece of the puzzle or some inspiration.
This tendency to overestimate our individual contributions can lead to conflict, especially when it results in devaluing the contributions of other group members. We work so interdependently in groups that it would be wise to recognize the extreme difficulty of teasing out each person’s contribution.
In a community of knowledge, what matters more than having knowledge is having access to knowledge.
The curse of knowledge is that we tend to think what is in our heads is in the heads of others. In the knowledge illusion, we tend to think what is in others’ heads is in our heads. In both cases, we fail to discern who knows what.
Because we confuse the knowledge in our heads with the knowledge we have access to, we are largely unaware of how little we understand. We live with the belief that we understand more than we do.
many of society’s most pressing problems stem from this illusion.
Our attitudes are not based on a rational, detached evaluation of the evidence, Kahan argues. This is because our beliefs are not isolated pieces of data that we can take and discard at will. Instead, beliefs are deeply intertwined with other beliefs, shared cultural values, and our identities.
“Venture capitalists back teams, not ideas.”
Far more important than the quality of an idea is the quality of the team. A good team can make a start-up successful because it can discover a good idea by learning how a market works and then do the work to implement the idea.
Every farmer knows that the hard part is getting the field prepared. Inserting seeds and watching them grow is easy.
The idea that education should increase intellectual independence is a very narrow view of learning. It ignores the fact that knowledge depends on others.
Instead of just learning long division, it’s learning to ask what you don’t know, like why long division works.
Illusion may be pleasant, but like ignorance, it is not bliss. The flip side of our illusion of understanding human relationships is that sometimes we don’t try to mend relationships because we believe we already know what’s going on. We cut ourselves off out of hubris or fear in the belief that we can pinpoint the other person’s failings. Inevitably, we fail to understand the full social dynamics; we are part of the problem ourselves.
