This flaw in the human mind explains why the world is full of overconfident, bumbling know-it-alls
Published: Sept 21, 2017 3:37 p.m. ET
The ‘knowledge illusion’ is worse than a mere failure to know what we don’t know; it’s not realizing how we know what we do know
A reporter gets send to search engines in shame.
"By forcing me to own up to the limits of what I understand about the universe, they help me, for at least a few fleeting moments of humility, to overcome one of the human mind’s most persistent and destructive biases, what psychologists call “the illusion of explanatory depth.” . . .
America in 2017 is a stronghold of strongly held beliefs. Yet “public opinion is more extreme than people’s understanding justifies,” Sloman and Fernbach write, citing depressing studies that found many Americans with the firmest views on, say, the Affordable Care Act barely scratch the surface of understanding the law. In fact, those of us with the most inflated sense of our own knowledge and skills may perform the worst, a phenomenon that psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect . . .
We all tend to mistake our shallow puddles of understanding for vast oceans, cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their new book ‘The Knowledge Illusion.’
It’s just no longer possible to know it all.
As Socrates, a guy fortunate to have born 2,500 years before the iPhone, put it,
“I neither know nor think that I know.”
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