Why We Are More Ignorant Than We Think
Tags: Knowledge, Mind, Brain, Information, Ignorance

Why We Are More Ignorant Than We Think

Humanity is incredible: we harnessed the energy we need from nature, found ways to fly over land and seas, and managed to sent machines over the solar system. However, any human individual is ignorant — we are less knowledgeable than we usually perceive.

In today's world, everyone must acquiesce to the use of complex machines — from the baker to the washing machine to computers, we are familiar with all these sophisticated machines, something no other animal in this planet can possibly do. How could we be ignorant?

How Much Do You Know About A Pen?

We don’t have to go too far to demonstrate our overconfidence in knowledge. Think about a pen, an ordinary pen. Rate, from 1 to 10, how much do you know about a pen?

Many people would give an answer greater than 5. After all, it is something we have been using for our entire life, we should know it more than anything. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if we rate our knowledge of a pen to be 2 or 3?

Now, state and explain how a pen works, then rate your knowledge again.

Unless you are one of the aberrations that know a lot about pens for some reason, you have just realized how overconfident we are to our knowledge. You could say less than you thought you could. We are familiar with pens, but we have little idea of how the ink comes out smoothly, nor do we know how they are manufactured. Not to mention complicated machines like computers: how much can you tell about the device you are using right now?

The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth

This phenomenon of people overrating their knowledge is called the illusion of explanatory depth, which has two main causes.

When we think of a pen, we think of how it works effortlessly in our experience. As a result, our knowledge is perceived to be greater than it actually is. Only the result — the pen working smoothly — is considered, while the process that causes the result is completely ignored. We don’t need to completely understand something in order to use it. Many of us know little about the structure of computers, or how the software precisely runs.

Humans do not care much about the knowledge they don’t need, we only concern about things that keep our lives running. So we know how to use a pen, but we don’t know how it works. The mechanisms of things around us do not matter in most situations. We only know that we can make use of something, but not how it works in detail. That’s why we do not think of the mechanism of the pen when rating our knowledge at the first time.

And equally importantly, we can access that information whenever we want.

Information is stored in our brain, but a brain is not the only place it exists. Multifarious information is held by other people’s brains, the internet, and the world. We can easily search on the internet for the mechanism of a pen, or we may pick up an actual pen and observe it.

Don’t know how to cook? All you need to do is look up a video on Youtube, with the title being something like ‘beginner recipe’. This alone is adequate to make people who never cook believe themselves to be good chefs. If the information can be easily accessed when needed, there is no reason for our brain to store it.

We have an illusion that we know it all — we mistaken our experience as everything that happens, and the knowledge we have access to as our own knowledge.

Everyone holds a small portion of knowledge, we know little as an individual. Only when we put the knowledge together, something miraculous can happen.