The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

What a great book. Years ago I read Steven Sloman's book Causal Models and have been struggling with when we can link causation and when a correlation is more realistic. This book breaks down 'the illusion of explanatory depth' and provides clear examples of all the knowledge that we assume we have (spoiler, we don't have). It is fascinating how much we think we 'know' because we have a reliance on others that we think do know. I can't tell you how much of what I know I have offloaded from my brain into systems like Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Notion, OneNote, and others. I know that I don't know, but I know that my systems do. Then there is all the knowledge that I have offloaded to my network. It is cool and scary how much of what we know we rely on our community for. One of the problems with the Knowledge Illusion in research and usability is that our participants will tell us what they think they know and we must probe for rich explanations. It is also important to recognize that when people are asked to explain, and the knowledge we are seeking to access resides in others it can be difficult for them to process which leads to a stress response.

Some of my notes from the book include

How is it that people can simultaneously bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their ignorance?

Individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people.

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. The ability to act in a new context requires understanding only the deep regularities in the way the world works, not the superficial details.

No one has ever been able to do everything. So we collaborate. That’s a major benefit of living in social groups, to make it easy to share our skills and knowledge.

The answer is that we do so by living a lie. We ignore complexity by overestimating how much we know about how things work, by living life in the belief that we know how things work even when we don’t.

Storytelling is our natural way of making causal sense of sequences of events. That’s why we find stories everywhere. A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happened yet.

The illusion of explanatory depth enables people to hold much stronger positions than they can support.

Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book