The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone Kindle Edition

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 and how this results in bad effects. But there was very little discussion about how to proceed with this understanding. What are some practical ways to improve the knowledge system so individual ignorance has less of an impact? How does this apply to bosses/managers? Community leaders? Parents? Social Media?

I would welcome a second book about that topic specifically - now that you know all the problems with how we think and where knowledge is actually stored, here are some practical strategies for making the most of it!

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 illusion discusses how the mind creates illusions to bridge many gaps in its understanding and how one's awareness of this can be improved.

The authors start out by giving examples of incredibly smart people doing foolish things as well as asking the reader to go through several exercises to test their understanding of their own knowledge. They are good prompts to familiarize the reader with their own ignorance that they were perhaps ignorant of themselves. The author discusses some neuroscience and gives some arguments for the benefits of a mind able to construct a causal framework in which events can be predicted. The author then discusses how this our views of causal relationships can be very wrong and the mind's intuition which we default do doesn't serve us when solving problems with unique basis of assumptions. The author's also touch upon AI and how it has evolved in the last 70 years, where it has not developed as people thought and where it is going now. I wouldn't give that much credit to this part of the book as there is much better material out there. The author discusses how collaborative thinking can be a good mechanism for people to see how differentiated expertise can lead to improved research abilities and that often if not always great human achievements are dependent on groups rather than individuals. The authors remind us that deifying the achievements of the individual are often due to our belief that in the mind of one person there can be so much whereas we are all constrained and dependent on both collaboration as well as idea copying. The authors discuss how technology is impacting our ability to be honest about our own knowledge and how our ability to experience is changing with technology. The author also brings up our weak understanding of science and the failings of initiatives to improve scientific reasoning and how even those with good scientific knowledge actually rest their understanding on the expertise of others rather than deep intrinsic knowledge of the subject matter. The authors also discuss the political sphere and the extremely weak ability for people to work through the causal implications of what their voter preferences would imply. As a consequence politics becomes dependent on what the group neighborhood thinks rather than based off individual thoughtfulness. This the author's note is part of the reason for voter divisiveness today and in particular its not as though value systems are so far apart its rather that people talk in big principles rather than policy repercussions and so debates are heated by framing and group thinking. The author's discuss how we need to view intelligence and human capacity and that our biases are innate so policies which have some paternalism can be beneficial. The author's bring up some ideas from behavioral economics like nudging people's preferences to better outcomes for society.

The knowledge illusion discusses a lot of concepts around how the mind functions, what its limitations are and how we can be blind to our ignorance. I think most thoughtful people recognize that their knowledge is limited and that the more complex the world is the more it is difficult to create a comprehensive view of causality. Nonetheless the book communicates its ideas well and gives some good examples highlighting how our own understanding of our ignorance is usually ignored, potentially to our peril. Worthwhile read, no really new ideas but good mix of psychology, technology, politics and social policy.

To save you the trouble of buying this book, I'll summarize its main points.

1. We don't know much at all.
2. We think we do.
3. Problems result.

Oh, a few other things:

1. There's a community of knowledge.
2. By being a member of that community, we have access, in some ways to that knowledge, but access does not equal possession. However, we think it does.
3. Problems result.

And finally.

1. People don't like lengthy explanations.
2. People like stories, false though they may be, and put great credence in them.
3. People seek causal explanations, but can use only those cause motivators with which they're familiar (hence gravity doesn't exist, but a rock thrown up loves the earth and seeks to return to it)
4. Experts opine on areas over which they have little expertise (like me, perhaps, here)
5. Ignorance = illusion = bliss until ... too late! And even then, who to blame?

There's more, here and there, but really, the authors have provided us with a book replete with lengthy examples that are repetitive, and hide the fact that there is little original research, and less original thought here. It is just a rehashing of (largely well publicized already) behavioral science work from the last two decades. And not much of it - we have death by story/example. Of far greater interest might be such works as:

Thaler's Nudge (which is referred to by the authors)
Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves (about the adaptive unconscious)
Ariely's Predictably Irrational (about mistakes we make, and make again)
Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds (how groups are smart ... if not always smart!)

These, but for the last, are about individual, not group decisions and behavior. And not about the fact that we don't know what we think we know. But they cover more material per page, and will result in a better "illusion of explanatory depth" for some of the ways we behave.