The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

  “We radically overestimate how much we know. The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought“I love this book. Their absorbing book reveals all the ways we delude ourselves into thinking we know more than we do.” —Jonah Berger, author of Contagious and Invisible Influence
He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and two children. His two children have flown the coop. Philip Fernbach is a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. He is the editor in chief of the journal Cognition
"Great overview of ignorance and community knowledge, but not enough advice on how to deal with it" according to Matt Kruse. This book is a fairly easy introduction to the topics of ignorance, the knowledge illusion, how we fool ourselves, and the value/necessity of storing knowledge in a group and how they came to be. The ideas are explained well with lots of examples. I wish everyone would read this book and really think about how much they don't know. The book directly addresses the current political climate, which makes it even more relevant.The only thing that tempted me to give it Great overview of ignorance and community knowledge, but not enough advice on how to deal with it Matt Kruse This book is a fairly easy introduction to the topics of ignorance, the knowledge illusion, how we fool ourselves, and the value/necessity of storing knowledge in a group and how they came to be. The ideas are explained well with lots of examples. I wish everyone would read this book and really think about how much they don't know. The book directly addresses the current political climate, which makes it even more relevant.The only thing that tempted me to give it 4 stars was what I thought was a lack of advice on how to deal with these problems. Many pages were spent explaining how human thinking is fragile . stars was what I thought was a lack of advice on how to deal with these problems. Many pages were spent explaining how human thinking is fragile . A. Menon said Over view of our ignorance of our ignorance. The Knowledge Illusion provides a readable overview of how people overestimate their knowledge base and how modern access to information is exacerbating our overconfidence in believing access to community knowledge represents immediate knowledge we possess ourselves. We live in an era of complexity and the basis of our modern civilizations is dependent on increasingly complicated science and highly specialized knowledge to function. At the same time our civilization's understanding of the physical world has reached new highs, our individual grasp of our pool of knowledge is weaker than ever. The knowledge ill. ''We suffer from an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager'' ''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 of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager'' (6)''Illusion of understanding''! Who me?''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 s

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven PinkerWe all think we know more than we actually do. 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. This book contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the world around us.. 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 k