We’ve seen that people are surprisingly ignorant, more ignorant than they think. We’ve also seen that the world is complex, even more complex than one might have thought. So why aren’t we overwhelmed by this complexity if we’re so ignorant? 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 … Continue reading Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach