Phil Fernbach

But I have gotten better at habitually checking my understanding.

And that practice, I do think, has made me more humble about my knowledge overall.

Well, I think the knowledge illusion occurs both for things that we care about and for things we don't care about.

I mean, who cares about how a toilet works, right?

However, I think your intuition is right that things that we care deeply about, we're more prone to an even stronger illusion.

And let me give you an example of that.

I've done some work looking at the opinions of people who have very strong counter-consensus beliefs.

views about science so people who are very anti-vaccination or very opposed to genetically modified foods and things like that and what we find is that the people who have the most passionate strongest views often know the least about the issues and one reason that could be is because that passionate strong view is backed up by a strong feeling that they understand the issue already

And because they have that strong view and they feel they understand the issue already, it's very hard to reach them with new information.

They're not going to look for new information because they feel like they already have mastery of the topic.

And so I think issues where we feel like we've really studied them and that we care about them a lot, we're going to be even more closed off to new perspectives, different perspectives on those issues.

That's such an interesting observation from Zach, that being in a new environment can prompt this curiosity.

I really like that.

I don't know, for your listeners who have children, young children, they ask why questions all the time.

There's a never-ending string of questions that they'll ask about some topic because the world is endlessly complex, as we've been talking about.

As we grow, we stop asking those questions so much.

We sort of forget about all the complexity in the world.

Part of that is our brains...

and our minds sort of protecting us from all that complexity and trying to focus us on what's actually gonna improve our lives, be functional for making decisions and all that kind of stuff.

What is gonna force us into actually asking those why questions?