Discussion
But the illusion is something you can puncture! People's perceptions and awareness of their own knowledge drop quite sharply once they go through this explicit kind of exercise. Forcing yourself to truly reason about cause can make you aware of connections you're just assuming without really understanding.
Psychologists, being curious people who absolutely cannot let it go once we find a method that makes people uncomfortable, have extended this
Here's a paper that looks at illusions of understanding for *extreme political attitudes* about complex policies
here's the publication of record:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797612464058
here's a pdf link I found for it: https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/usys/ites/ecosystem-management-dam/documents/EducationDOC/EM_DOC/Fernbach%20et%20al%202013%20Political%20extremism%20is%20supported%20by%20an%20illusion%20of%20understanding.pdf
Researchers asked participants to rate their understanding of a political policy, then explain how the policies worked...interestingly, being pushed to produce *mechanistic* (causal) explanations for their views moderated those political views, while merely listing *reasons* for the views didn't
I take away a few implications from this evidence, which falls under the broad area of "metacognition" and belief formation.
- our minds are tremendously adaptive at learning to manipulate things around us, but perfect manipulation and even perfect outcome production isn't always a direct test of understanding. You can have a flawed mental model that still produces a reliable outcome. To study understanding, we need to go deeper.
- if you're interested in becoming an expert -- if you're a student, starting a career, or just picking up a hobby or skill, you might try asking yourself "what are the zippers here." Everyone can use a zipper, but few people can fix broken ones and design unimagined new ones. If you want to become one of those people in an area, find the zippers and learn their mechanisms.
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