The Knowledge Illusion Quotes

“We typically don’t know enough individually to form knowledgeable, nuanced views about new technologies and scientific developments. We simply have no choice but to adopt the positions of those we trust. Our attitudes and those of the people around us thus become mutually reinforcing. And the fact that we have a strong opinion makes us think that there must be a firm basis for our opinion, so we think we know a lot, more than in fact we do.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“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.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life . . . People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents, and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“We live under the knowledge illusion because 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.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Instead of appreciating complexity, people tend to affiliate with one or another social dogma.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“The human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“[That] the driving force of the evolution of human intelligence was the coordination of multiple cognitive systems to pursue complex, shared goals [is called] the social brain hypothesis. It attributes the increase in intelligence to the increasing size and complexity of hominid social groups. Living in a group confers advantages, as we have seen with hunting, but it also demands certain cognitive abilities. It requires the ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, to understand and incorporate the perspectives of others, and to share common goals. The social brain hypothesis posits that the cognitive demands and adaptive advantages associated with living in a group created a snowball effect: As groups got larger and developed more complex joint behaviors, individuals developed new capabilities to support those behaviors. These new capabilities in turn allowed groups to get even larger and allowed group behavior to become even more complex.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“The secret to our success is that we live in a world in which knowledge is all around us. It is in the things we make, in our bodies and workspaces, and in other people. We live in a community of knowledge.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Intelligence can also be broken down in terms of the skills that constitute it. One theory breaks it down into three separate skills: language ability, the speed and ability to perceive the world accurately, and the ability to manipulate spatial images in one’s head. Another theory goes even further, arguing that there are eight distinct dimensions that underlie intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalist, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“the mind evolved to support our ability to act effectively.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“We will see that humans specialize in reasoning about how the world works, about causality.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“No one individual had one one-thousandth of the knowledge necessary to fully understand it all.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Instead of appreciating complexity, people tend to affiliate with one or another social dogma. Because our knowledge is enmeshed with that of others, the community shapes our beliefs and attitudes. It is so hard to reject an opinion shared by our peers that too often we don’t even try to evaluate claims based on their merits. We let our group do our thinking for us. Appreciating the communal nature of knowledge should make us more realistic about what’s determining our beliefs and values.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Most experts love the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, especially when their contribution is acknowledged. Contributing to the community of knowledge is in our collaborative nature.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Once we start appreciating that knowledge isn't all in the head, that it's shared within a community, our heroes change. Instead of focusing on the individual, we begin to focus on a larger group.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“In a community of knowledge, what matters more than having knowledge is having access to knowledge.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Language, memory, attention--indeed, all mental functions--can be thought of as operating in a way that is distributed across a community according to a division of cognitive labor.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“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.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“And Dunning has collected an impressive amount of evidence that the reason it happens is that those who lack skills also lack the knowledge of what skills they’re missing.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“This pairing explains what is commonly known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, that those who perform the worst overrate their own skills the most. The effect is found by giving a group of people a task to do and then asking them how well they think they’ve done on the task. Poor performers overestimate how well they’ve done; strong performers often underestimate their performance.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“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.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“The mind stretches beyond the brain to include the body, the environment, and people other than oneself, so the study of the mind cannot be reduced to the study of the brain. Cognitive science is not the same as neuroscience.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“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. To discard a belief often means discarding a whole host of other beliefs, forsaking our communities, going against those we trust and love, and in short, challenging our identities.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“illusion of explanatory depth.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“Unlike most people, highly reflective people crave detail.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“What’s more relevant to our discussion is that more reflective people—people who score better on the CRT—show less of an illusion of explanatory depth than less reflective people.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“To achieve complete understanding necessitates understanding increasingly more and more, and the combination of everything you need to understand to achieve complete understanding quickly becomes more than you can bear without, well, exploding.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“[That] the driving force of the evolution of human intelligence was the coordination of multiple cognitive systems to pursue complex, shared goal [is called] the social brain hypothesis. It attributes the increase in intelligence to the increasing size and complexity of hominid social groups. Living in a group confers advantages, as we have seen with hunting, but it also demands certain cognitive abilities. It requires the ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, to understand and incorporate the perspectives of others, and to share common goals. The social brain hypothesis posits that the cognitive demands and adaptive advantages associated with living in a group created a snowball effect: As groups got larger and developed more complex joint behaviors, individuals developed new capabilities to support those behaviors. These new capabilities in turn allowed groups to get even larger and allowed group behavior to become even more complex.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“The sixth chakra, also called the Ajna chakra, is located between the eyebrows.”
― Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone