The Knowledge Illusion part 3

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 third 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.

"We would not be such competent thinkers if we had to rely only on the limited knowledge stored in our heads and our facility for causal reasoning. The secret to our success is that we live in a world in which knowledge is all around us. It is in the things we make, in our bodies and workspaces, and in other people. We live in a community of knowledge.

We have access to huge amounts of knowledge that sit in other people's heads: We have our friends and family who each have their little domains of expertise. We have experts that we can contact to, say, fix our dishwasher when it breaks down for the umpteenth time. We have professors and talking heads on television to inform us about events and how things work. We have books, and we have the richest resource of all time at our fingertips, the Internet." (Page 13)

The authors go on to explain how things themselves demonstrate knowledge as many can be taken apart to show us how to fix them or used to show us how to use them. A city is laid out so traveling around it shows you how it is laid out.

Modern life includes what scientists call a division of cognitive labor. You can find information much more easily, don't need to remember as much as before, only needing to remember where some of it is stored.

The division has always existed. No one person knows for example every song or how to play every instrument or how to do everything in construction or every dish that could be cooked. The labor has been divided up, the cognitive labor within a single profession even.

 "So we collaborate. That's a major benefit of living in social groups, to make it easier to share our skills and knowledge. It's not surprising that we fail to identify what's in our heads versus what's in others', because we're generally - perhaps always - doing things that involve both." (Page 14)

 "Sharing skills and knowledge is more sophisticated than it sounds. Human beings don't merely make individual contributions  to a project, like machines operating in an assembly line. Rather, we are able to work together, aware of others and what they are trying to accomplish. We pay attention together and we share goals. In the language of cognitive science, we share intentionality. This is a form of collaboration that you don't see in other animals. We actually enjoy sharing our mind space with others. In one form, it's called playing." (Page 14)

 "You now have the background you need to understand the origin of the knowledge illusion. The nature of thought is to seamlessly draw on knowledge wherever it can be found, inside and outside of our own heads. We live under the knowledge illusion because we fail to draw the line between what is inside and outside of our own heads. And we fail because there is no sharp line. So we frequently don't know what we don't know." (Page 15)

 "Instead of appreciating complexity, people tend to affiliate with one or another social dogma. Because our knowledge is enmeshed with that of others, the community shapes our beliefs and attitudes. It is so hard to reject an opinion shared by our peers that too often we don't even try to evaluate claims based on the merits. We let our group do our thinking for us. Appreciating the communal nature of knowledge should make us more realistic about what's determining our beliefs and values. " (Page 16)


"Appreciating the communal nature of knowledge can reveal biases in how we see the world. People love heroes. We glorify individual strength, talent and good looks. Our movies and books idolize characters who, like Superman, can save the planet all by themselves. TV dramas present brilliant but understated detectives who both solve the crime and make the climactic final arrest after a flash of insight. Individuals are given credit for major breakthroughs. Marie Curie is treated as if she worked alone to discover radioactivity, Newton as if he discovered the laws of motion in a bubble. All the successes of the Mongols in the twelfth and thirteenth century are attributed to Genghis Khan, and all the evils of Rome during the time of Jesus are often identified with a single person, Pontius Pilate.

The truth is that in the real world, nobody operates in a vacuum. Detectives have teams who attend meetings and think and act as a group. Scientists not only have labs with students who contribute critical ideas, but also have colleagues, friends and nemeses who are doing similar work, thinking similar thoughts, and without whom the scientist would get nowhere. And then there are other scientists who are working on different problems, sometimes in different fields, but nevertheless set the stage through their own findings and ideas. Once we start appreciating that knowledge isn't all in the head, that it's shared within a community, our heroes change. Instead of focusing on the individual, we begin to focus on a larger group. " (Page 17)

" There are other implications too. 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 horsepower. Individual intelligence is overrated. It also means that we learn best when we're thinking with others. Some of our best teaching techniques at every level of education have students learning as a team. This isn't news to education researchers, but the insight is not implemented in the classroom as it should be. " (Page 18)