Jason Furman's Reviews > The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

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.