03/30/2024
Gong Fairy Tale merchants take note
Even if you think you understand something complicated after cursory exposure, you almost certainly don’t understand it well enough to hold forth on the topic, Arthur C. Brooks writes: https://theatln.tc/U2fDzEb2
The internet has fed a huge reservoir of good information, but it has also created an explosion of nonsense. Some of what people see is straight-up fake news—predatory attempts to swindle consumers. But much of the bad advice on the web actually originates in a psychological phenomenon called “the illusion of explanatory depth,” a phenomenon similar to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which explains how people with low levels of skill in an activity tend to overrate their competence. One explanation for this is “hypocognition”—people don’t know what they don’t know. As researchers have shown, when a person’s confidence is highest though their actual knowledge is low, they become very believable to others—despite not being reliable. And the more inaccurate people are, the more they tend to be swayed by their own underinformed overconfidence.
The two ways we fall prey to the illusion are as consumers and as producers, Brooks continues. The plight of the consumer of misinformation is the hardest to address, because it isn’t always easy to know when someone is a true expert or just flush with false confidence. The key question to ask is “Does the source of this technical assertion have a genuine technical background?” If the answer is no, proceed with caution. The second condition—being a supplier of bad information—is easier to treat. “Learning about novel ideas is a thrill, and indeed, many researchers believe that interest itself is a positive emotion—a source of pleasure rooted in the evolutionary imperative to learn new things,” Brooks writes. “Cruising the web in search of interesting things is great fun. But beware your own susceptibility to the illusion of explanatory depth.”
🎨: Jan Buchczik
