Phil Fernbach
speaker
299 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Oct
Phil Fernbach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And one reason for that is because we tend to remember the things that help us maintain a positive self-image. We want to believe that we're smart and good at investing. That's a very natural human tendency to want to remember the good and kind of forget the bad. And so this doesn't just occur in the domain of investing, but can occur in other domains as well.
Yes, and that is what made me so passionate about these ideas. Because it turns out that the reason that we should care about this illusion is not because people don't understand how a ballpoint pen or a toilet works. But I realized at some point that the illusion applies to just about everything that we grapple with as a society and as individuals. I was doing this work
in the midst of a political environment in the United States that was becoming more and more polarized. And as I was doing this work, I had this big insight that, wow, we are arguing with incredible vitriol across the aisle about issues that are extremely complex and that nobody understands in a lot of depth and detail.
And yet we have these passionate, strong views and are unable to compromise across the political divide. And that was a core issue that really got me interested in this stuff.
I think in many cases they are wrong. And actually we've demonstrated that in experiments. So what we've done is something very akin to the toilet experiment that I described earlier. We bring people into the lab and we ask them about their position on the issues of the day, the things that we're arguing about as a society. And then we ask them how well they understand those issues.
People tend to say, oh yeah, I understand it pretty well. And then we ask them to explain the mechanism, explain in detail how it works. And we find this large decrease in the sense of understanding. So people are humbled by that because they try to explain and they realize, wow, I just have a talking point or two. I actually don't understand this thing in detail.
So I've studied this in the context of controversial scientific issues. So things like the safety of genetically modified foods or the reality of climate change. In those cases, there's a substantial minority of the population who expresses really extreme, strong counter-consensus views. views that are counter to the scientific consensus.
And what we find in that case is that the people who have the strongest
Counter consensus views have the highest levels of subjective understanding They feel like they understand these issues the best which makes sense because if I feel like I understand it really well I'm gonna have a strong opinion But when we measure their actual understanding of the issue in a variety of ways They actually have the lowest levels of objective knowledge so when you put those things together
the people who have the most extreme counter consensus views have this huge gap between what they think they know and what they actually know.
I think that that's right. So if I feel like I understand something and I feel like I know it well, I'm gonna be less likely to listen to counter evidence and counter explanations or to do more research into the issue to learn more about it. If I already feel like I understand it, it's really hard to reach me with counter evidence.
And so the people whose views seem to be the most out of line with what the scientific community says are the ones who are hardest to reach because they already feel like they understand the issue.
So we're not in the habit of engaging in a lot of explanation. most of the time. We just take things for granted, as we've been discussing. And so when we get in the habit of doing that, it's sort of hard to hide from ourselves that we don't understand things as well as we thought we did. A great example of this comes from work by Rebecca Lawson on people's understanding of bicycles.
So if you ask somebody, do you know how a bicycle works? A lot of people would say, oh yeah, I kind of know how that works. But then in the study, what she did was she asked people to draw bicycles. And if you sit down and try to do it, I encourage the listeners to try to do it. It's much more difficult than you might have anticipated.
And that's just a great example of, in that case, it's impossible to hide from yourself the gaps in your knowledge. They've just become revealed on the page as you try to draw.
That's right. A test that is designed to actually gauge knowledge. understanding of the way things work as opposed to a test that is merely regurgitating facts. So a test that's well designed to actually evaluate whether somebody understands the details or mechanisms of the way that something works would indeed reveal those gaps.
I have a colleague who was recently telling me a story about one of his classes where he was just imploring students, if you are using artificial intelligence to try to help you with the class. Make sure that you understand this and not just are using the artificial intelligence. And yet, when the test came around and they'd all been using ChatGPT, they learned that they
did not understand the material as well as they thought that they did because they had been relying on the artificial intelligence. And they got very upset with him. And he sort of explained to them, look, I tried to tell you, but this is such a natural human thing to overestimate our understanding. that it's very hard to actually appreciate the gaps in our knowledge.
It's so natural for us to go through life just not really questioning and assuming we know more than we do that we don't really see it. And that's why getting into this habit of questioning yourself and questioning your understanding is a very powerful tool for dispelling the illusion.
So in our studies, we've often compared two different types of explanations. One is this mechanistic explanation. How does it work? And the other is more about why you believe what you do. So reasons. And you can think about those two modes of thinking as being more explanatory or mechanistic on the one hand, and then more argumentative on Or advocacy-based, on the other hand.
Showing 261–280 of 299 · page 14 of 15
← Previous
Next →