“The tiniest bit of knowledge can make us feel like an expert,” authors Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their book, The Knowledge Illusion. “Once we feel like an expert, we start talking like an expert. And it turns out that the people we talk to don’t know much either. So relative to them, we are experts.”14 On and on the cycle goes, reinforcing knowledge that isn’t. “This,” Sloman and Fernbach note, “is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous.”
