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    The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
    Unavailable
    The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
    Unavailable
    The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

    Written by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

    Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom." -Steven Pinker

    We all think we know more than we actually do.
     
    Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We're constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact-and usually we don't even realize we're doing it.
     
    The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individually oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. This book contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the world around us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 14, 2017
    ISBN9781524752026
    Unavailable
    The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
    Author

    Steven Sloman

    Steven Sloman is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University where he has worked since 1992. The author of two books, Casual Models: How we think about the world and its alternatives and Similarity and Symbols in Human Thinking, he is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition.

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    Reviews for The Knowledge Illusion

    4/5

    29 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Really interesting and well written. Encourages intellectual teamwork and development.
    • 3/5
      It starts of with a convincing idea but then overworks it for far too many pages before ultimately branching out to social advocacy at which point it's lost me.
    • 1/5
      This book is a perfect example of superficial knowledge. It gets facts wrong, presents one sided opinions as fact, represents corporate sponsored research as science and never mentions the Dunning-Kruger Effect, although they do mention David Dunning a few minutes before the end of the book.
      Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow would be a better choice for solid scientific information of this subject.

      4 people found this helpful