User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/The Knowledge Illusion

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone is a 2017 non-fiction book about superficial knowledge by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.

Themes
Overarching themes include cognitive science, cognitive psychology, decision-making and problem solving. According to The New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's article "Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds", Sloman and Fernbach's book provides an explanation for the way in information that contradicts one's opinion is easily dismissed as unconvincing. She wrote, "If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration."

Reviews
Robert Aremstrong's review in The Financial Post described how The Knowledge Illusion, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols and Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass Sunstein are all "written with vigour and humanity. But the solutions the authors present are less compelling than their articulations of what has gone wrong. This is not a criticism so much as an acknowledgment that they have gotten hold of a very nasty set of problems." Armstrong said that "Sloman and Fernbach offer clever demonstrations of how much we take for granted, and how little we actually understand. An example: try drawing a picture of a bicycle, with the chain, all the bits of the frame, and the pedals all in the correct place."

In his The New York Times review, Yuval Harari said that Sloman and Fernbach "hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual" claiming that humans think in groups, not as rational individuals. Harari said that "some of the most interesting and unsettling parts of the book" say that, "individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less." In his April 10, 2019 review, The New Yorker editor Michael Luo said that The Knowledge Illusion offered a "as good an explanation as any of how our social-media based news ecosystem is leading to undesirable outcomes in our democracy." Luo cited Sloman and Fernbach, "When group members don’t know much but share a position, members of the group can reinforce one another’s sense of understanding, leading everyone to feel like their position is justified and their mission is clear, even when there is no real expertise to give it solid support. Everyone sees everyone else as justifying their view so that opinion rests on a mirage." Lua summarized, "People vastly overestimate what they know, and their unjustifiably strong opinions are reinforced by other people who are similarly ill-informed, creating self-reinforcing communities of misinformation."