Phil Fernbach

And I think that does give us a very strong feeling of understanding and knowledge because we have very easy access to that.

Just by virtue of searching the internet, we come to feel that we understand things better than we do or that we have more knowledge than we do.

If we subsequently try to perform, take a test, or perform some task without the internet, we actually do worse than we expect.

And this has really important consequences, for instance, in education.

Students who can look things up might actually not master the material and might do poorly on exams and things like that.

What I think makes this really interesting and exciting at this moment is with the advent of artificial intelligence, meaning...

that our search of the internet, it's no longer a Google search.

Now it's something, you know, orders of magnitude, more intelligent, more capable.

And so there has begun to be some really interesting research looking at what the effects are of using AI on people's levels of confidence.

And I'm excited to see where that research goes.

Absolutely.

Dennis makes a beautiful point that has actually been made by some of the greatest minds throughout history.

People like Aristotle and Einstein have said similar things.

And that's precisely right.

What happens with expertise is that we develop more of an understanding of the boundaries of a domain.

If you are a novice at some task, you might think that there's not that much to know.

But as you learn more and more, you realize how much there is to know and how complex things are.

So Dennis is absolutely right about that.

I think to some extent that's correct.

The more we learn and the more we realize that how complex and nuanced most things are, that might make us more habitually sort of careful about jumping to really strong conclusions or opinions on issues.