Oct 12, 2018
“How is it possible that people can simultaneously bowl us over with their ingenuity and disappoint us with their ignorance? How have we mastered so much despite how limited our understanding often is? These are the questions we will try to answer in this book.”
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone was written in 2017 by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Ben chats with Sean Fenlon to find out what on earth is going on according to their provocative and insightful perspective.
About the Book
We all think we know more than we actually do.
Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but
most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we
achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive
scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive
and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a
rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in
the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on
information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies,
our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we
interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered
fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and
sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes
irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature
of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know
more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs
are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to
education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative
minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge
Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we
create intelligence using the community around us.