The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker

We all think we know more than we actually do.
 
Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
 
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.

• The Enigma of Reason
• Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us
• How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
• Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong
• The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
• The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides
• The Retreat of Western Liberalism
• The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction