The Knowledge Illusion - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 10: The New Definition of Smart */

2026-09-09T11:54:27Z

10: The New Definition of Smart

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:54, 9 September 2026
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	**Practical skills		**Practical skills
	**Skills related to wisdom that help to achieve a common good through the infusion of positive ethical values.		**Skills related to wisdom that help to achieve a common good through the infusion of positive ethical values.
			*It turns out that as long as you measure performance on a wide enough variety of mental abilities, the test you choose doesn't really matter.
			*It turns out that the best racetrack gamblers, IQ was not even related to the complexity of the process they used to make their decisions.
			*An effective group doesn't need a lot of people with high g scores; it needs a balance of people with different skills.
	== 11: Making People Smart ==		== 11: Making People Smart ==
	* -		* People are primarily designed for action, not for listening to lectures, not for manipulating symbols, and not for memorizing facts.
			* The illusion of comprehension arises because people confuse understanding with familiarity or recognition.
			* An important part of an education consists of learning whether a claim is plausible, who would know, and whether that person is likely to tell the truth.
	== 12: Making Smarter Decisions ==		== 12: Making Smarter Decisions ==
	* -		* Most of us are explanation foes - We want a little explanatory detail, but not too much.
			* Some people are explanation fiends - They try to master all the details before making a choice.
			* The marketplace is set up to take advantage of explanation foes' abhorrence of detail. Most advertising relies on the vaguest of justifications.
			* Most of us are explanation foes. Our lives are filled with situations where we are confronted with things we don't really understand. Sometimes we don't even realize there are gaps in our understanding. Even when we do, we are often too uninterested or embarrassed to ask for help.
			* Buying a mortgage is perhaps the most consequential financial decision most of us will ever make. The community of knowledge makes us feel like we understand more deeply than we do, and this gives us the necessary confidence to make this complicated decision.
			* The nudge approach - It is easier and more effective to change the environment than it is to change the person. And once we understand what quirks of cognition drive behavior, we can design the environment so that those quirks help us instead of hurt us.
			* Knowing what you don't know allows you to get help and fill in the gaps when the need arises.
	== Conclusion: Appraising Ignorance and Illusion ==		== Conclusion: Appraising Ignorance and Illusion ==
	* -		* -

Robert.adlington: /* 10: The New Definition of Smart */

2026-09-09T11:37:42Z

10: The New Definition of Smart

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 * If a polarized group are asked to explain a policy, their positions tend to converge.
 == 10: The New Definition of Smart ==
-* Our tendency to mentally substitute individuals for complicated entities (MLK for civil rights, Obama for the ACA, etc) can be seen in how we talk about institutions
+* Our tendency to mentally substitute individuals for complicated entities can be seen in how we talk about institutions (MLK for civil rights, Obama for the ACA, etc).
 == 11: Making People Smart ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: /* 6: Thinking with Other People */

2026-09-08T20:07:36Z

6: Thinking with Other People

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:07, 8 September 2026
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	* 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. The mind uses the brain and other things to process information.		* 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. The mind uses the brain and other things to process information.
	== 6: Thinking with Other People ==		== 6: Thinking with Other People ==
	* -		* When multiple cognitive systems work together, group intelligence can emerge that goes beyond what each individual is capable of.
			* Before humans, success at hunting mandated superior physical abilities: strength, size, or speed. Then humans appeared with their ability to think and, quite suddenly, being as big as a bus provided scant protection.
			* The mind did not evolve in the context of individuals sitting alone solving problems. It evolved in the context of group collaboration, and our thinking evolved interdependently, to operate in conjunction with the thinking of others. Much like a beehive, when each individual is master of a domain, the group intelligence that emerges is more than the sum of its parts.
			* The social brain hypothesis attributes the increase in intelligence to the increasing size and complexity of hominid social groups.
			* The ability to reason about other people's mental states is a critical talent for working together in large groups.
			* Humans have an ability that no other machine or animal cognitive system does: Humans can share their attention with someone else. When humans interact with one another, they do not merely experience the same event; they also know they are experiencing the same event.
			* Once we can share attention, we can share common ground. We know some things that we know others know, and we know that they know that we know, etc. The knowledge is not just distributed; it is shared. One knowledge is shared in this way, we can share intentionality; we can jointly pursue a common goal. A basic human talent is to share intentions with others so that we accomplish things collaboratively.
			* Infants as young as fourteen months old can understand an adult's intention. Chimpanzees and other apes cannot at any age.
			* Apes are sophisticated, but they cannot share a human's intention. An ape can follow a human's gaze to see what they are looking at but cannot understand that the human is pointing to an object that they were playing with together. They cannot attend to the object and understand that the human is attending to the same object.
			* Human babies as young as nine months old use gesture to attract other people's attention so they can jointly attend to objects. In contrast, chimps and other apes gesture only as a way of manipulating others - telling others how to do things or to respond to requests. Humans gesture to get on the same wavelength as someone else; apes gesture to get things done
			* Children want to engage for the sake of engagement; chimps cannot grasp the concept of engagement. What distinguishes people is their ability - even their need - to jointly attend with other people to what they are doing. People are built to collaborate.
			* People naturally divide up cognitive labor, often without thinking about it.
			* Individuals made less of an effort to remember items when their partners' area of expertise included that item. In other words, each partner deferred to the other's expertise to store and recall the items relevant to that expertise. People tend to remember what they have to within a particular community to best make their contribution to the division of cognitive labor. We rely on experts to remember everything else.
			* Individual thinking and group thinking are so intertwined, it's hard to keep track of the boundaries.
			* Merely knowing that knowledge is available in the community makes people feel knowledgeable.
			* My ability to act doesn't depend on the knowledge that happens to be in my head at a given moment; it depends on what knowledge I can access when I need it.
			* My knowledge has to be full of pointers and placeholders rather than just facts.
			* When I say "the Sphinx" to other English speakers, I assume we are talking about the same thing even though they may know as little about it as I do. So my knowledge of the Sphinx is really just a placeholder that says this is where the Sphinx resides. My knowledge about Egypt is choc-full of pointers like this that tell me that the details are elsewhere.
			* What's amazing about people is that, at least when we agree, we're gesturing toward the same little piece of the world even though we have different scraps of information about it. And this leads to the second property of communal knowledge; The different bits of knowledge that different members of the community have must be compatible. We may not all always agree entirely, and in many case we don't, but we have to at least be thinking about related things or the division of cognitive labor would fall apart.
			* Nothing is completely within our conceptual grasp.
			* The knowledge illusion occurs because we live in a community of knowledge and we fail to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads from the knowledge outside of it.
			* A lot of human understanding consists simply of awareness that the knowledge is out there. Sophisticated understanding usually consists of knowing where to find it. Only the truly erudite actually have the knowledge available in their own memories.
			* 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.
	== 7: Thinking with Technology ==		== 7: Thinking with Technology ==
	* -		* At each step in human evolution, tools, culture, cognition, and genes changed together to create a new balance that gave our ancestors more power to alter the environment to their liking.
			* Humans are made for technological change. Our bodies and brains are designed to incorporate new tools into our activities as if they were extensions of our bodies.
	== 8: Thinking About Science ==		== 8: Thinking About Science ==
	* -		* 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. According to this view, is it any wonder that providing people with a little information about GMOs, vaccines, evolution, or global warming has little impact on their beliefs and attitudes? The power that culture has over cognition just swamps these attempts at education.
			* 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.
	== 9: Thinking About Politics ==		== 9: Thinking About Politics ==
	* -		* Just as people overrate their own understanding of toilets and can openers, they also overrate their understanding of political policies.
			* If a polarized group are asked to explain a policy, their positions tend to converge.
	== 10: The New Definition of Smart ==		== 10: The New Definition of Smart ==
	* -		* Our tendency to mentally substitute individuals for complicated entities (MLK for civil rights, Obama for the ACA, etc) can be seen in how we talk about institutions
	== 11: Making People Smart ==		== 11: Making People Smart ==
	* -		* -

Robert.adlington: /* 4: Why We Think What Isn't So */

2026-09-08T16:13:38Z

4: Why We Think What Isn't So

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 * Stories are about the causal relations in the world, however much we simplify them. So individuals need a cognitive system that can understand the causality inherent in whatever the story they are telling us about. We need a cognitive system that can understand what protagonists and antagonists want to achieve, how obstacles prevent achievement of those goals, and how those obstacles are overcome (or not, as the case may be). These are all causal notions involving agents trying to cause the world to be a certain way. It is no coincidence that storytelling, the most natural mode of human discourse, depends on the very sam resource - causal knowledge - that allows thinking to produce more effective action.
 == 4: Why We Think What Isn't So ==
-* -
+* Thought is full of guesswork and approximation.
 == 5: Thinking with Our Bodies and the World ==
-* -
+* The subsumption architecture conceives of intelligence as a grand hierarchy: High-level sophisticated tasks are performed by combing simpler skills that are in turn just organizations of even simpler skills. Sophisticated tasks get done not through exhaustive computation and planning but by engaging a hierarchy of actors in an organized way that, at the lowest level, are just responding directly to the environment.
 == 6: Thinking with Other People ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: /* Introduction: Ignorance and the Community of Knowledge */

2026-09-07T18:16:00Z

Introduction: Ignorance and the Community of Knowledge

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 == Introduction: Ignorance and the Community of Knowledge ==
-* -
+* In fact, most knowledge is little more than a bunch of associations, high-level links between objects or people that aren't broken down into detailed stories.
 == 1: What We Know ==
-* -
+* This is the illusion of explanatory depth. Before trying to explain something (eg, how a toilet works, or how a bike's parts fit together), people feel they have a reasonable level of understanding; after explaining, they don't.
 == 2: Why We Think ==
-* -
+* Hyperthymesia, highly superior autobiographical memory, is extremely rare, affecting only a handful of people, who can remember in copious detail everything that has happened to them.
 == 3: How We Think ==
-* -
+* We are familiar with a huge number of mechanisms that produce effects.
 == 4: Why We Think What Isn't So ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: Created page with "== Introduction: Ignorance and the Community of Knowledge == * - == 1: What We Know == * - == 2: Why We Think == * - == 3: How We Think == * - == 4: Why We Think What Isn't So == * - == 5: Thinking with Our Bodies and the World == * - == 6: Thinking with Other People == * - == 7: Thinking with Technology == * - == 8: Thinking About Science == * - == 9: Thinking About Politics == * - == 10: The New Definition of Smart == * - == 11: Making People Smart == * - =..."

2026-09-07T17:31:19Z

Created page with "== Introduction: Ignorance and the Community of Knowledge == * - == 1: What We Know == * - == 2: Why We Think == * - == 3: How We Think == * - == 4: Why We Think What Isn't So == * - == 5: Thinking with Our Bodies and the World == * - == 6: Thinking with Other People == * - == 7: Thinking with Technology == * - == 8: Thinking About Science == * - == 9: Thinking About Politics == * - == 10: The New Definition of Smart == * - == 11: Making People Smart == * - =..."

New page

== Introduction: Ignorance and the Community of Knowledge ==
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== 1: What We Know ==
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== 2: Why We Think ==
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== 3: How We Think ==
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== 4: Why We Think What Isn't So ==
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== 5: Thinking with Our Bodies and the World ==
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== 6: Thinking with Other People ==
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== 7: Thinking with Technology ==
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== 8: Thinking About Science ==
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== 9: Thinking About Politics ==
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== 10: The New Definition of Smart ==
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== 11: Making People Smart ==
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== 12: Making Smarter Decisions ==
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== Conclusion: Appraising Ignorance and Illusion ==
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