The Knowledge Illusion, Unions Trending, and the Power of Political Confusion
Howdy. I hope you are having a nice long weekend. Here are a few interesting ideas I came across recently.
I am reading a fascinating book titled The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach. One of the big ideas is that we outsource a lot of our knowledge to other people, technologies, and the Internet. This outsourcing makes perfect sense since we cannot hold everything we want to know in our heads, but rather we just need to hold a pointer to where the information resides. It’s an interesting look at why we think we know more than we actually know. This has definitely opened up my eyes! Here are a few interesting quotes:
“How can we get around, sound knowledgeable and take ourselves seriously while understanding only a tiny fraction of what there is to know? The answer is that we do so by living a lie. 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.” (35)
“Intuition gives us a simplified, coarse , and usually good enough analysis, and this gives us the illusion that we know a fair amount. But when we deliberate, we come to appreciate how complex things actually are, and this reveals to us how little we actually know.” (83)
“We have seen that having knowledge available in other people‘s heads lead us to overrate our own understanding. Because we live in a community that shares knowledge, each of us individually can fail to distinguish whether knowledge is stored in our own head or in someone else’s. This leads to the illusion of explanatory depth: I think I understand things better than I do because I incorporate other people’s understanding into my assessment of my own understanding.” (136)
Labor unions are seeming to make a comeback. With the pandemic exposing a lot of the problems facing low paid workers in our economy for years, hopefully this trend continues. Here’s an interesting look at how one Amazon warehouse in Staten Island unionized from In These Times.
This is a very interesting look at the HBO miniseries DMZ and how political uncertainty and confusion can act as propaganda which takes the place of real political discourse. I’ve also recently connected some dots with this idea to climate change denials while watching the Paramount+ docuseries Black Gold. ExxonMobil appears to have been knowingly trying to confuse people about climate change science for decades.
Anything spark your interest this week? I’d love to hear about it.
Be well. Stay safe.