The “Illusion of Explanatory Depth”: How Much Do We Know About What We Know? 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. Many things that we believe we have good reasons for, we will find we don’t if we question those beliefs.
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
August 22nd, 2007 at 12:45 pm
He wanted to address the exact issue of finding things that not only appear to be useful (which includes many instances of things that appear to be useful but in fact are not – we people are prone to this in many ways) but are predictably useful…
June 9th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
humans care a great deal about how they are being treated relative to others. In many ways, fairness seems to matter more than absolute measures of how well they are faring…
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:42 am
But it doesn’t look that way at first does it? Optical illusions provide evidence that you cannot always trust what seems obvious…
October 21st, 2008 at 8:15 am
fearful, ill-informed, un-trained (in ways that build the capacity to make rational decisions) workers pursuing their self interest is often much more harmful than workers that are more secure…
January 5th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Excellent reminder of the risks of analyzing data for correlations. We continue to, far to often, fail to interpret data properly…