The Knowledge Illusion part 1

This post is on the book The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman (cognitive scientist and professor at Brown University) and Phillip Fernbach (cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at Colorado's Leeds School of business).

This post is the first in a series of sixteen that address The Knowledge Illusion and unless otherwise noted all quotes are from The Knowledge Illusion. I recommend reading all sixteen posts in order.

I have written on numerous other books on psychology, social psychology, critical thinking, cognitive dissonance theory and related topics already but discovered this one and feel it plays a complimentary and very needed role. It helps to explain a huge number of "hows" and "whys" regarding the other subjects I mentioned, all of the subjects.

I generally have written primarily about Scientology, after being in Scientology for twenty five years, and tried to evaluate information from other subjects, both for its own sake and against the experience of being in Scientology to see what, if any, understanding it can bring to that.

It is a niche, granted, but it has been my niche.

With The Knowledge Illusion I found a book that presents an entire hypothesis and analysis for a concept I kept running into bits of it variations of in different works and even different subjects - we as individuals have some knowledge but there is a lot of evidence that it isn't a match for what our intuition tends to be, not by a lot. In fact our intuition itself and judging the accuracy of a belief by our certainty is one of our strongest and best hidden flaws in terms of our efforts to be rational, that is to say accurate, meaning perceiving and understanding things as they truly are.

I kept finding that the truth as found in a lot of research with real studies and experiments by lots of people has been that we as human beings habitually assign causes to events and behaviors and are generally extremely confident in our judgements on such matters and when looked at closely it seems that we are terrible at getting it right but undeterred by failure in understanding the motives of others and equally inaccurate and equally undeterred by failure in understanding ourselves.

It is one of the most counterintuitive discoveries in science and took a lot of work by a lot of people to establish and more work to get across that it is true for me and you, regardless of intelligence, education or any other factors.

The Knowledge Illusion has far more it explores than the "high certainty" and "low accuracy" blindspot we have regarding motivations in ourselves and others. But that kept coming up over and over in good books on psychology, neuroscience, critical thinking and other subjects. A lot of roads lead to the same discovery.

Scientology has very much, well, the opposite idea from what the research and evidence in all these other subjects supports. In Scientology certainty is knowledge. Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard used the idea that being certain was more important than facts. He also redefined reality as agreement, rather than what actually exists, which is what reality is, or was before Hubbard's redefinition for his purposes.

The Knowledge Illusion takes on many of the difficult to understand and contradictory aspects of human nature. Scientology has efforts to explain the same things but I think they are failures.

If you are a Scientologist or ex Scientologist I invite you to read this and consider the ideas presented here, especially the ones that have scientific evidence and research behind them in comparison to the ideas from Scientology. Decide for yourself.

If you were never in Scientology and want to understand how people can believe things like Scientology and be capable in some ways but not capable in other ways then I hope this helps to answer how and why. And it applies to far, far more than Scientology. In life most of us deal with far more than Scientology.

The authors started the introduction with a story of an error in one of the fusion bomb tests by the United States government. It was a bomb called Shrimp, code named Castle Bravo and it was about three times as powerful as the scientists expected. It caused death for some and radiation sickness and contaminated several inhabited areas.

The authors started out "This story illustrates a fundamental paradox of humankind. The human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic." They went on "Each of us is error-prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant."

 "It is incredible that we have developed governance systems and economies that provide the comforts of modern life even though most of us have only a vague sense of how those systems work."

"How is it 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?" (page 3)

I found the answers they provide worth serious consideration. I hope you will too.