The Illusion of Understanding

Posted on November 25, 2006 by John Hunter

The “Illusion of Explanatory Depth”: How Much Do We Know About What We Know? (broken link 🙁 was removed) is an interesting post that touches on psychology and theory of knowledge.

Often (more often than I’d like to admit), my son… will ask me a question about how something works, or why something happens the way it does, and I’ll begin to answer, initially confident in my knowledge, only to discover that I’m entirely clueless. I’m then embarrassed by my ignorance of my own ignorance.
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I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if it turns out that the illusion of explanatory depth leads many researchers down the wrong path, because they think they understand something that lies outside of their expertise when they don’t.

I really like the title – it is more vivid than theory of knowledge. It is important to understand the systemic weaknesses in how we think in order to improve our thought process. We must question (more often than we believe we need to) especially when looking to improve on how things are done.

If we question our beliefs and attempt to provide evidence supporting them we will find it difficult to do for many things that we believe. That should give us pause. We should realize the risk of relying on beliefs without evidence and when warrented look into getting evidence of what is actually happening.

I commented on in this for Science and Engineering blog.

Related: Management is Prediction – Tom Nolan’s talk – Innovate or Avoid Risk – Management: Geeks and Deming – Theory in Practice

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