Better's Blinkist

The illusion of explanatory depth causes us to think we know more than we actually do.

Well, you might be surprised. Here’s the thing: people have a habit of overestimating how much they know about how things work, even when they don’t know much at all. This gap between assumed understanding and actual knowledge is called the illusion of explanatory depth, or IoED, for short.

26 January, 2020 06:46 Share

This led the students to an uncomfortable realization: they were unable to articulate knowledge that they’d been sure they possessed, and their understanding was in fact quite shallow. That’s the IoED in a nutshell. How a bicycle works is just one of many things that people, when put to the test, have difficulty explaining. Other tests have revealed that people overestimate their knowledge of all sorts of everyday objects, from zippers to toilets to wristwatches. Indeed, people tend to overestimate their knowledge of everything.

26 January, 2020 06:47 Share

The human brain didn’t evolve to store information and the world is extremely complex.

His methods were ingenious. For instance, he calculated how many bytes would be required to store the average adult’s vocabulary. From this number, he extrapolated the approximate size of an average adult’s entire store of knowledge. He carried out many other, similar calculations – but each estimate of how many bytes our knowledge base would require was essentially the same: roughly one gigabyte. Now, even if this number were ten times larger, it’d still be laughably small. This proves an important point: our brains, unlike computers, are not designed to function primarily as repositories of knowledge.

26 January, 2020 06:49 Share

The human brain evolved for action, and diagnostic reasoning may be what differentiates us from other animals.

Well, one of them is capable of action, and the other is not. This difference is profound, because the ability of organisms to act on and interact with their environment is what led to the evolution of the brain.

26 January, 2020 06:50 Share

hapless

26 January, 2020 06:50 Share

Jellyfish possess about 800 neurons (Venus flytraps have none), and though this hardly constitutes a brain, it does enable the blobby invertebrates to take actions. While the bug-consuming plant must wait around for hapless insects, the jellyfish is capable of, among other primitive actions, snatching prey with its tentacles and moving that prey to its mouth.

26 January, 2020 06:50 Share

Humans possess billions of neurons. We can travel to space and compose concertos. But we evolved such complex brains for the same reason that jellyfish evolved their rudimentary system of neurons: to enable effective action. So if all brains evolved to assist action, what (besides billions more neurons) differentiates humans from other, less neuronally endowed animals? Well, one answer might be our ability to engage in causal reasoning.

26 January, 2020 06:51 Share

This is called diagnostic reasoning, and although we’re by no means perfect at it, our ability to do it is arguably what sets us apart from other sentient creatures.

26 January, 2020 06:51 Share

It’s hard to reason from effect to cause, so we use storytelling to help us make causal sense of the world.

This droll parable has a few causal lessons to teach, but the most pertinent relates to the difficulty of diagnostic reasoning. As the tale demonstrates, we’re not exactly adept at reasoning backward, from effect to cause. When the vandals get confused about what’s causing their actions (bigotry? money?), spray-painting the storefront no longer seems worth it. Reasoning from effect to cause is simply harder than reasoning from cause to effect. For instance, it’s much easier to predict that someone with a stomach ulcer will experience pain than it is to determine that someone experiencing pain has a stomach ulcer.

26 January, 2020 06:52 Share

Stories make it easier for us to envision counterfactual events, and thus to consider possible alternatives to current actions. If people couldn’t do this, democracy would never have arisen from monarchy and no human would have ever set foot on the moon.

26 January, 2020 06:53 Share

We reason in two different ways: intuitively and deliberatively.

Well, to arrive at an answer, let’s start by explaining how humans think. When trying to answer a question or solve a problem, people engage in one of two kinds of reasoning. Either they use intuition, or they use deliberation. Intuition is what helped you answer "elephant!" with such lightning speed. It’s also what makes people fall victim to the illusion of explanatory depth.

26 January, 2020 06:54 Share

Well, to arrive at an answer, let’s start by explaining how humans think. When trying to answer a question or solve a problem, people engage in one of two kinds of reasoning. Either they use intuition, or they use deliberation.

26 January, 2020 06:54 Share

We use intuition all the time because it’s sufficient for day-to-day purposes. But when things get more complicated – when we have to draw a bicycle rather than just ride it, for example – intuition breaks down.

26 January, 2020 06:55 Share

Intuitions are subjective – they are yours alone. Deliberations, on the other hand, require engagement with a community of fellow knowledge possessors. Even if you deliberate in solitude, you’ll converse with yourself as though talking to someone else. As will become clear in the next blink, this is just one of the many ways that we externalize internal thought processes to assist cognition.

26 January, 2020 06:56 Share

We think with our bodies and the world around us.

We also use our bodies and physical actions to aid thought. This is called embodiment, and its proponents assert that thought is not an entirely abstract process that plays out inside your head. For example, children learning to count almost always use their fingers. And adults almost always find it easier to do math problems and spell words with the help of pen and paper.

26 January, 2020 06:58 Share

Our success as a species is the result of collective intelligence and the ability to collaborate.

It essentially argues that big brains are the result of communal living. Living with one another and collaborating on certain projects (such as hunting mammoths) exerted new mental demands on our ancestors – demands that they then evolved to meet. As these demands became more complex – as we, say, began divvying up mammoth meat among tribe members – our brains also grew in complexity. This, in turn, made us better at communal living, which made it possible for us to form even larger communities. Navigating these complex social systems had a profound effect on our cognitive abilities

26 January, 2020 07:00 Share

When Homo sapiens first emerged, their brains were already quite complex; living in groups, however, made us expert collaborators. And it was this collaborative ability that led to the development of another crucial skill: the division of cognitive labor. If we were unable to parcel out cognitive work, modern life would be impossible

26 January, 2020 07:00 Share

The division of cognitive labor makes it possible to take one skill (building houses) and divide it into subskills, like plumbing and building walls. What’s more, it makes it possible for wall builders, even if they know little about plumbing, to construct walls that plumbers can put pipes in. They can do this because of shared intentionality. Each worker can collaborate with all the others because everyone shares the same intention: building a house. Humanity’s greatest accomplishments, from smartphones to space exploration, are the result of these two abilities: the division of cognitive labor and shared intentionality.

26 January, 2020 07:01 Share

Machines can’t share intentionality and it’s unlikely that a superintelligence will emerge.

Indeed, it’s so complex that it seems lifelike; our phones talk to us and our laptops automatically install mysterious updates. And technology’s lifelike quality fools us into thinking that it, like other people, can share our intentions. But, of course, it can’t. Just because it can help you arrive at your destination doesn’t mean it wants you to get there. It’s easy to forget this, however, and so, when the GPS system tells us to turn left, we turn left – and end up in the lake.

26 January, 2020 07:02 Share

However, this is probably an idle fear. Machines, unlike humans, can’t share intentionality. They may seem smart but, actually, they simply have access to vast stores of information that they can process very quickly. They can only do what they’ve been programmed to do. The exponential growth of the human brain was caused by collaborative instincts and an ability to share intentions – we have no idea how to program those skills. So the birth of an evil superintelligence probably isn’t imminent. More worrisome is our overreliance on machines that, though sophisticated, aren’t actually very bright.

26 January, 2020 07:03 Share

We can avoid groupthink by thinking causally and politicians simplify matters by appealing to sacred values.

Well, one reason is groupthink, a term used by the social psychologist Irving Janis. Groupthink is the tendency of communities (or a sufficient majority of their members) to uncritically arrive at a consensus on a particular issue. When everyone around you believes the same thing, it’s difficult to believe something else. This is what happened in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China – and, clearly, its effects can be catastrophic.

26 January, 2020 07:07 Share

Consider an experiment conducted by the authors. They asked participants to rate, from one to seven, their opposition to or support of particular political policies, such as whether unilateral sanctions should be imposed on Iran. They then asked them to explain, in causal terms, the effects that such policies would have. Unsurprisingly, most participants had difficulty doing this.

26 January, 2020 07:08 Share

Next, the authors asked them to again rate the strength of their opposition or support. Interestingly, after struggling to give a causal explanation, radical participants (those who’d initially strongly opposed or strongly supported a particular policy) rated themselves as much more moderate.

26 January, 2020 07:08 Share

Take abortion. Pro-lifers don’t really consider the effects of antiabortion laws. They simply believe that killing a human fetus is wrong. With similar intractableness, pro-choicers believe that women should have the final say in what happens to their bodies. Such beliefs are based on sacred values, which are all but impossible to alter. There’s nothing wrong with that, but beware: politicians often use the language of sacred values to promote policies that deserve closer scrutiny.

26 January, 2020 07:09 Share

We need to redefine smart and reassess education.

But here’s what often goes unmentioned: neither man worked alone. Each benefited from a rich network of collaborators. And each stood on the shoulders of the hard-working individuals who’d come before. We forget this because the whole story is far too complex for most of us to remember in great detail. Their names function as a sort of shorthand. This leads to a problem, however. Most of us begin to believe the simplified story – that a small cohort of individual geniuses are responsible for history’s great deeds and discoveries.

26 January, 2020 07:09 Share

A new definition of smart would take these abilities into account. So, rather than merely measuring a person’s IQ, we ought to assess her ability to contribute to group tasks.

26 January, 2020 07:10 Share

The purpose of education isn’t only to pass on knowledge; it’s also to remind people of their ignorance. After all, once you’re aware of how little you know, you’ll be much more likely to seek help from the community of knowledge possessors that you’re a part of.

26 January, 2020 07:10 Share

That’s not only an invaluable skill. It also shows that you understand something we should all keep in mind: we never think alone.

26 January, 2020 07:11 Share