This is a pop science book about how little individuals know, compared to how much they think they do. It is written by two academic cognitive scientists, but in a breezy style, designed for the layman. Their premise is that humans actually store very little factual knowledge in their individual minds. Thought is for action and so humans have been evolutionarily conditioned to only keep the thoughts in our heads that help further purposeful action of some sort. “Your causal understanding is limited by your need to know…. The mind is not built to acquire details about every individual object or situation. We learn from experience so that we can generalize to new objects and situations.”
One thing all humans suffer from is illusion of explanatory depth. If you are asked to explain how a toilet, a bicycle, photosynthesis, or a mutual fund works, how detailed could you be? “Before trying to explain something, people feel they have a reasonable level of understanding; after explaining, they don’t.” It is by design that we don’t remember everything. “Remembering everything gets in the way of focusing on the deeper principles that allow us to recognize how a new situation resembles past situations and what kind of actions will be effective.” Humans have evolved to learn by causal analysis. We can make predictions about the effects of our actions on other people. We can also reason backwards- figuring out how something that happened came about from effect to cause. We also tell stories- both to others and ourselves. We can imagine worlds that will never be and futures that will never happen. “Storytelling helps us to imagine how the world would be if something were different.” These are things that no other animal can do. We also think with more than just our brains. Our body lets us know about our environment in many ways, before our brains are even conscious of our surroundings. “Thought uses knowledge in the brain, the body, and the world more generally to support intelligent action…. The mind is not in the brain. Rather, the brain is in the mind.”
Humans have also adapted to use our group mind- the collective knowledge spread throughout society, across time and space. Cognitive division of labor has exponentially increased the efficiency and power of our brains. It has also changed how the mind evolved. “It 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.” Thinking together also demanded that humans evolve to communicate more effectively, to understand each other, to share common goals, and to incorporate others’ perspectives into their own thoughts. (Primates who live in larger groups also have larger brains.) The unique aspect of human society is the ability to share intentionality, which allows us to pursue common endeavors. Cognitive researcher Michael Tomasello suggests, “children,…. but not chimpanzees, often seemed to collaborate just for the sake of collaborating.” Research has shown that in couples where one partner handles most of the financial upkeep of the household their skills improve, while the other partner’s actually atrophies, over time. In another experiment, however, when individually asked to assess the percentage of household chores one does, almost every couple’s combined response was well over 100%. Group mind should make us cognizant that “we work so interdependently in groups that it would be wise to recognize the extreme difficulty of teasing out each person’s contribution.”
Another illusion comes from technological advances. In one study, people were permitted to search the Internet for answers, but when later asked how they found the information, respondents forgot all about their searches and claimed that they knew the facts all along. Furthermore, “the act of searching the Internet and finding answers to one set of questions caused the participants to increase their sense that they knew the answers to all questions, including those whose answers they had not researched.” Other knowledge illusions come because our belief system is a connected web. “Beliefs are not isolated pieces of data that we can take or 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.” Furthermore, once we are ensconced in these communities, these beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes become mutually-reinforcing, as ideas bounce back and forth in an echo-chamber of confirmation.
We also use heuristics to fill in causal models that seem similar to new technologies or scientific concepts that we grasp only vaguely. Worst, according to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, on any given test, whether it be cognitive or even driving, “those who perform the worst overrate their own skills the most…. Those who lack skills also lack the knowledge of what skills they’re missing.” Nonetheless, humanity has advanced by specializing, compartmentalizing, and sharing group knowledge. “The world and our community house most of our knowledge base. 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” and knowing what we do not know.
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