The more you read this book the more you realize how little you know. The author does a great job of exposing us to our own illusions of explanatory depth making us realize how we feign understanding without actually attaining it. However it is isn't in vain. Drawing upon a community of knowledge is possibly the more efficient way of going about life as it is extremely difficult for anyone to be an expert at one topic let alone everything. And while a certain dose of illusion gives one the self confidence to take risks to do the outrageous, push the boundaries- for most being aware of how much we don't know is a good reality check.

Một quyển sách nói về việc bạn có thật sự hiểu một vấn đề hay chỉ là ảo tưởng và bị bộ não đánh lừa. Sách không đề cập sâu đến cách nhận biết ta đang rơi vào tình trạng và giải quyết vấn đề. Lập lại nội dung chúng ta đã biết rõ và viết hơi lang mang không tập trung vào điều cốt lõi.

Got halfway through this one and then decided I was finished. Parts of it are very dry and like others have mentioned, the book feels very disjointed.

Humbling read on the limits of our knowledge and understanding

Listened to audiobook (on 1.30% speed). Three big takeaways: Ignorance, Illusion of Understanding, Community of Knowledge. I liked that the authors said the topics were obvious but only if you think about them. Thought provoking. Recommend.

Should I post my 1,000-word review for this book which I had to write for one of my Masters's classes?
Nah.
It was a solid read, helped me realize how much I don't know! Overall, I felt the first few chapters were enough to teach me of the concept, would have read better as a paper and maybe not a book.

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 [b:The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter|25761655|The Secret of Our Success How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter|Joseph Henrich|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439857632l/25761655._SX50_.jpg|45606716] by [a:Joseph Henrich|526072|Joseph Henrich|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1604628216p2/526072.jpg]).

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.

This was the first book I've ever seen that went through human thinking and reasoning in a scientific way. It was a fascinating read for most of the time. Somewhere in the middle I got a bit bored, maybe I felt to repetitive or maybe I was just a bit tired of reading in english (I speak portuguese), so I took a break. This week I decided to come back to it and OMG I was just so engaged in the topics and the discussion. The authors desing some very good metaphors so it's quite easy (I guess hahaha) to catch the idea of a hypothesis or a theory. The ending summarizes the whole idea the authors have and it's really impossible to disagree after reading the whole book. My favourite parte were the chapters where they discuss why there is anti-science thinking today (and why is it so big) and their discussion on political opinions and extremism.

So, I'm taking a class that gave us a number of books to choose from to write an essay on how it connects to the subject matter we're discussing (i.e. Information Communities). I decided to go with The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. I won't post my boring essay, but I'll just give a basic description of the book and a short rundown of my thoughts.

In the Knowledge Illusion the authors are making the point that since human brains evolved to filter out most information, much of what we think we "know" is actually external information gathered from our knowledge community (friends, family, local experts [e.g. plumbers], teachers, books, and the internet.) “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” (15).

They give many examples throughout and one such example was that of the zipper. Participants were asked to rate on a scale how well they understood how zippers work. Next, they were asked to explain how zippers work in as much detail as possible. Last, they were asked to once again rate how well they understood zippers. Not surprisingly, participants rated their knowledge lower the second time around. The authors refer to this throughout as an Illusion of Understanding. They explain that humans in general are guilty of this because it's simply how our brains evolved. We seamlessly pull information from our external environment (knowledge community) and blend it with our internal environment (our mind).

They go into a lot more than this and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in topics of cognitive science, psychology, and/or politics. Only downside is that I felt like the writing was clunky at times. They also become a bit repetitive and I found myself sometimes skimming different examples that were making the same points.