The Knowledge Illusion #1

I read this book. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is relevant. It doesn’t claim that all knowledge is illusory. The subtitle doesn’t mean we cannot think alone. It may sound wrong to some people, since in some sense we always think alone. That is, nobody can think for me is analogous to nobody else can digest the food I swallow. Adding to the analogy, we assimilate knowledge and ideas produced by other people similar to eating food produced by other people.

The rest of this post will be from the Introduction and provides an overview of the book.

“The human mind is not like a desktop computer, designed to hold reams of information. The mind is a flexible problem solver that evolved to extract only the most useful information to guide decisions in new situations. As a consequence, individuals store very little detailed information about the world in their heads. ... To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within their skulls but also knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people. When you put it all together, human thought is incredibly impressive. But it is a product of a community, not of any individual alone.”

“Our point is not that people are ignorant. It’s that people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager.”

We all have domains in which we are experts, but in most subjects we only abstract bits of information, and what we know is little more that a feeling of understanding we can’t really unpack. While the function of thought might have evolved to represent the world, it could also be to communicate, for problem-solving or decision-making. The authors’ thesis is that thought is for action.

“Because we think communally, we tend to operate in teams. This means that the contributions we make as individuals depend more on our ability to work with others than on our individual mental horsepower.” Examples are a space vehicle launch and a large, complex business.