The Knowledge Illusion part 4

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 fourth 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.

The authors of The Knowledge Illusion in chapter one What We Know attack "the same illusion that we have all experienced: that we understand how things work even when we don't." (Page 20)

In this chapter they describe the work of Frank Keil who was a cognitive scientist at Cornell for many years and moved to Yale in 1998. They describe how Keil realized that the theories people hold on how things work are "shallow and incomplete" but that Keil had a hard time finding a scientific way to show people how much they actually know in comparison to what they think they know. Keil tried different ways but they took too long and people just made stuff up.

Then one day he discovered an idea he developed. He figured out a way to show what he called the illusion of explanatory depth. IoED paradigm for short. He grabbed Leon Rozenblitz and together they asked a series of questions.

Here is an example.

 "1. On a scale from 1 to 7, how well do you understand how zippers work?
   2. How does a zipper work? Describe in as much detail as you can all the steps

If you're like most of Rozenblitz and Keil's participants, you don't work in a zipper factory and you have little to say in answer to the second question. You just don't really know how zippers work. So, when asked this question:
 3. Now, on the same 1 to 7 scale, rate your knowledge of how a zipper works again." ( Page 21)

They described how most people who do this realize how little they know and lower their knowledge rating by a point or two.

They found this can work with speedometers, piano keys, flush toilets, cylinder locks, helicopters, quartz watches, and sewing machines. They found this at many elite universities for grad students and under grads, they found it at a large public school and a random sampling of Americans on the internet.

They found it not just with objects but with just about everything.

 "People overestimate their understanding of political issues like tax policy and foreign relations, of hot-button scientific topics like GMOs and climate change, and even on their own finances. We have been studying psychological phenomena for a long time and it is rare to come across one as robust as the illusion of understanding." ( Page 22)

Regarding the subjects and their explanatory depth:

 "They realized that they have less knowledge that they can articulate than they thought. This is the essence of the illusion of explanatory depth. Before trying to explain something, people feel they have a reasonable level of understanding; after explaining, they don't." ( Page 23)

 "According to Rozenblitz and Keil, "many participants reported genuine surprise and new humility at how much less they knew than they originally thought." "( Page 23)

Further research showing the knowledge illusion was done by Rebecca Lawson, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool. She used a picture of a bicycle and has the two wheels, the frame, seat and handlebars present. She left out the chain, pedals and all other parts. People are asked to fill in the rest and very frequently designed bikes that wouldn't work and sometimes couldn't turn. Even people who regularly ride bikes get it wrong.

This brings us to a couple ideas. We demonstrably overestimate how much we know. Well this prompts the question how much do we know ? Thomas Landauer worked on cognitive science for decades. He worked at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and tried to apply his ideas for twenty five years at Bell labs.

Folks like Alan Turing and John von Neumann developed computing and in the sixties scientists thought the mind worked like a computer. Landauer worked in this period.

By the 1980s Landauer worked to estimate the size of human memory. In 2017 the memory of a laptop computer was about 250 to 500 gigabytes as long term storage. Landauer used many techniques to estimate how much knowledge people have. Going by vocabulary he estimated an average adult at half a gigabyte.

He used a very different technique involving how quickly people recall information against how quickly they identity a new item. With very precise measurements of differences he tried factoring forgetting and a number of other factors.

He ended up with the conclusion that people likely have one gigabyte of memory on average. Even if he is off by a factor of ten that is a very small amount of memory.

Many computers, phones and videogames have far more memory and they are not sentient. We are able to function in society. We can sit at a table with five other adults and follow the conversation if everyone is gossiping about the neighborhood and understand the different feelings and ideas everyone at the table holds. We can know what is going on if the topic switches to the news or work and we all speak at least one language.

So, how can we know so little but function so well ?

The key is how OUR minds work.

"Cognitive scientists don't take the computer metaphor so seriously anymore. There is a place for it; some models of how people think when they're thinking slowly and carefully - when they are deliberating step-by-step as opposed to being intuitive and less careful - look like computer programs. But for the most part these days, cognitive scientists point to how we differ from computers. Deliberation is only a tiny part of what goes on when we think. Most of cognition consists of intuitive thought that occurs below the surface of consciousness. It involves processing huge quantities of information in parallel. " (Page 27)

"More to the point, people are not computers in that we don't just rely on a central processor that reads and writes to a memory to think. As we'll discuss later in the book, people rely on their bodies, on the world around them, and on their minds." (Page 27)

The authors go on next to explain the incredible complexity of the world around us. They use examples like the thirty thousand parts that go into a modern car and that those parts can be designed in thousands of ways that affect how they interact and how the car as a whole functions.

Modern airplanes are so complex no one person understands everything about them. They require multiple teams to design and build. Modern cars are so complex many mechanics see themselves as replacing modules. To understand the basics students work on older engines so they can learn effectively.

Many modern devices like clocks and coffee makers are so complex that most people throw them away and replace them.

And nature is many, many , many times more complex than human inventions. From black holes to gravity to why ice is slippery much is unknown in science. And when you get to biology it becomes much more complex.

Even cancer cells are largely not understood. And as you move to larger things it only gets more complex. The human brain has an estimated 100 billion neurons and far, far more connections.

The authors describe the brain as far too complex for any one person to understand. They may be right. I have tackled dozens of books on neuroscience and psychology and related fields and am quite certain I know far less than one percent of one percent of what I would need to know to form an educated opinion regarding many, possibly most, questions regarding the human brain.

They introduce other aspects of complexity such as weather and geography and fractals and on and on.

It is a mind boggling effort to consider how complex the world is.

So, this brings us to the big question - the enormous contrast between how little we know and how we can function, even feel and sound knowledgeable in such a complex world ?

"The answer is that we do so by living a lie. We ignore complexity by overestimating how much we know about how things work, by living life in the belief that we know how things work even when we don't. We tell ourselves that we understand what's going on, that our opinions are justified by our knowledge, and that our actions are grounded in justified beliefs even though they are not. We tolerate complexity by failing to recognize it. That's the illusion of understanding." (Page 35)

The authors note how young children can ask a stream of never ending "whys" and that as adults we don't. We gave up at some point and accepted that we understand enough. And that is a key in understanding how and where we accepted the illusion of knowledge.