Sloman, S. & Fernbach, P. (2017)

Sloman, S. & Fernbach, P. (2017). The knowledge illusion. Why we never think alone. Riverhead books.

•	5. “The mind is a flexible problem solver that evolved to extract only the most useful information to guide decisions in new situations. As a consequence, individuals store very little detailed information about the world in their heads.”

•	14. “No one has ever been able to do everything. So we collaborate. That’s a major benefit from living in social groups, to make it easy 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.”

•	21. Illusion of explanatory depth (IoED): “a method for studying ignorance ..., a method that involved simply asking people to generate an explanation” “1 “On a scale from 1 to 7, how well do you understand how ... work? 2. How do ... work? Describe in as much detail as you can all the steps involved in a ... operation. 3. Now, on the same 1 to 7 scale, rate your knowledge of how ,,, work again.”

•	25. Storage space for information in the human brain: “half of a gigabyte”, (26) “1 gigabyte”

•	35. “people are surprisingly ignorant, more ignorant than they think.” We live a lie in a complex world. “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.”

•	51. John Garcia specifies Pavlov: “Pavlovian associations don’t occur between arbitrary pairs of stimuli, they happen only when the association has some possibility of making causal sense.”

•	58. “Causal reasoning is the basis for human cognition; it’s in large part what the brain does.” 59. Humans are better at forward causal thinking, predictive thinking, than backward causal thinking, diagnostic thinking. But we make an error in predictive thinking that we don’t make in diagnostic thinking. 60. ”people don’t worry about alternative causes when thinking about a likelihood of an effect given a cause”. •	69. ff Examples

•	73. We make mistakes in causal thinking because we often fall back on frequently experienced causal models. We do not make correct causal inferences in every situation.”

•	79. “With regard to causal reasoning, the conclusion we come to quickly and intuitively are not always the same as the conclusions we come to through careful deliberation.”

•	80. “The illusion [of explanatory depth] is a product of the intuitive mind; we think about how things work automatically and effortlessly. But when we deliberate our knowledge, our illusion is shattered.”

•	81ff. Examples Cognitive Reflection Test

•	83. “more reflective people ... show less of an illusion of explanatory depth than less reflective people”.

•	95. “This assumption that the world is behaving normally gives people a giant crutch. It means that we don’t have to remember everything because the information is stored in the world. If I need to know something, all I have to do is look at it.”

•	100. “people use facts about the world ... to simplify what they do. In so many cases, the information we respond to isn’t in our heads; it’s in the world.”

•	105. “Our body is telling us whether it considers an action appropriate or not. ... Fortunately, we ... retain the option of agreeing or not with our bodies’ opinions.”

•	117. “what distinguishes people is their ability – even their need – to jointly attend with other people to what they are doing. People are built to collaborate.”

•	117. “The ability to share intentionality supports perhaps the most important human capacity of all: the ability to store and transmit knowledge from one generation to the next.” Cumulative culture.

•	124. “In a community of knowledge, what matters more than having knowledge is having access to knowledge.”

•	128. “A lot of human understanding consists simply of the awareness that the knowledge is out there. Sophisticated understanding usually consists of knowing where to find it. Only the truly erudite actually have the knowledge available in their own memories.”

•	140. Human can share an intention. “The ability to share an intention is a critical part of what matters in an intelligent agent. Central human functions like language and conceptualization depend on it because ... they are both collaborative activities.” Computers are tools. “They cannot share your intentions in order to pursue joint goals.”

•	148. “For a crowdsourcing scheme to work, it’s not enough just to have a big community; the community needs to have the necessary expertise.”

•	149. For crowdsourcing to work: “Experts must be induced to participate; methods must be desined to choose the right set of experts for any particular problem; cognitive labor needs to be divided up effectively; and methods need to be developed to fairly distribute both the risks and the rewards associated with each project.”

•	157. Walter Bodmer Report measures public understanding of science.

•	160. “Scientific attitudes are not based on rational evaluation of evidence, and therefore providing information does not change them. Attitudes are determined instead by a host of contextual and cultural factors that make them largely immune to change.”

•	160. “our beliefs are not isolated pieces of data that we can take and discard at will. Instead, beliefs are deeply intertwined with other beliefs, shared cultural values, and our identities. To discard a belief often means discarding a whole host of other beliefs, forsaking our communities, going against those we trust and love, and in short, challenging our identities.”

•	162. “We typically don’t know enough individually to form knowledgeable, nuanced views about new technologies and scientific developments. We simple have no choice but to adopt the positions of those we trust. Our attitudes and those of the people around us thus become mutually reinforcing. And the fact that we have a strong opinion makes us think that there must be a firm basis for our opinion, so we think we know a lot, more than in fact we do.”

•	170. “to effectively influence scientific understanding and attitudes we need to understand the driving forces behind the deficits. New information that runs counter to our causal models is hard to absorb and easy to dismiss, especially when it contradicts the position advocated by the people we trust. But it’s harder to dismiss the discovery that one doesn’t understand the mechanisms at play.”

•	177. “We found that attempting to explain how a policy worked not only reduced our participants’ sense of understanding, it also reduced the extremity of their position.”

•	179. “Causal explanation may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.” Asking for reasons rather reinforces.

•	186. Debates framed in sacred values lead nowhere. Debates about consequences do. “Changing the frame of the conversation led people to think differently about the issue and change their minds, while the number of people changing their position led to a shift in how people talked about the issue.”

•	192. “We have found that a good way to reduce people’s extremism and increase their intellectual humility is to ask them for an explanation of how a policy works. Unfortunately, the procedure does have a cost. Exposing people’s illusions can upset them.” Often end of communication.

•	210. Effectiveness of teams in performing a group task. “indicators of group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction did not predict how well groups did. Other measures did: social sensitivity, how often groups took turn, and the proportion of females in the group.”

•	211. “the success of a group is not predominantly a function of the intelligence of its individual members. It is determined by how well they work together.”

•	216. “People are primarily designed for action, not for listening to lectures, not for manipulating symbols, and not for memorizing facts. ... Activity is required. We learn what we need to know to take the actions necessary to accomplish our goals.”

•	228. Class is divided into research groups that each focus on a separate component of the issue. ... 229. Their job is to master their subject area, to learn as much about the component as they can. Then ... [the] class reorganizes into teaching groups that each include one member of each research group.” The groups then get a task. Jigsaw method.

•	241. “We should be thinking about decision-making from a communal perspective. The knowledge required for decision-making is not merely in individuals’ heads but depends heavily on the community of knowledge.”

•	258. Dunning-Kruger. “The unskilled just don’t know what they don’t know.”