THE ILLUSION OF KNOWLEDGE
by Yasushi Kusume
'People are more ignorant than they think they are.’
The Knowledge of Illusion, Steve Solman and Philip Fernbach, Riverhead Books, 2017
For Solman and Fernbach, the secret to our success as the human race is that we live in a community of knowledge. We are surrounded by learning and can draw on centuries of accumulated information to help ourselves progress. Yet for all that, the two point out, it’s startling how often we fail to pay attention to how much we don't know.
'The nature of thought,’ they continue, ‘is to seamlessly draw on knowledge wherever it can be found, inside and outside of our own heads. We live under the knowledge illusion because we fail to draw an accurate line between what is inside and outside our heads. And we fail because there is no sharp line. So we frequently don't know what we don't know.’
How little we know
Yuval Noah Harari agrees. He’s observed that we often rarely appreciate how little we know about certain matters, because we lock ourselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where our beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. YouTube videos, Instagram demos, and Facebook tutorials offer us the illusion of instant expertise in almost any subject under the sun. They encourage us to believe that recognising a topic is the same as comprehending it.
Michael Kardas, of The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, highlights the fault in such thinking. ‘The more that people watched others,’ he writes, ‘the more they felt they could perform the same skill, too – even when their abilities hadn't actually changed for the better.’
‘Anyone,’ he continues, ‘who goes online to look up tips before attempting a skill — from cooking techniques to DIY home repairs to X Games tricks — would benefit from knowing that they might be overconfident in their own abilities after watching, and should exercise caution before attempting similar skills themselves.’
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Kardas is referring to what’s commonly known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This occurs when people with low ability overestimate their own skills and fail to recognise just how much expertise is involved in a particular task. (Just think of all the failed cordon bleu meals amateur chefs produce after following a recipe once.)
The trouble is that, in today’s world, almost every answer to almost every question is available to us instantly on the internet, whenever we want it. When we need to learn a new skill now, we ask Google or YouTube. Everything from preparing a receipt to lubricating a motorbike chain or removing stains from a shirt.
That said, the internet is not the root cause of such thinking: mistaking recognition for expertise. It’s just that in offering instant access to vast amounts of information, it has helped – unwittingly – to amplify our shortcomings. We’ve become self-appointed experts on all sorts of topics, but experts without any comprehensive knowledge, understanding, or ability.
At which point you may well be thinking: what does this have to do with Design? The answer? Sunday designers.
Sunday designers
The illusion of knowledge I’ve described above poses a crucial problem for anyone looking to find and nurture creative expertise in their organization. It’s a problem I described in an earlier article, 'What makes a knowledgeable, talented, and skilled designer?'
In article I flagged the growing – and in my view highly unrealistic – desire on the part of some organizations to recruit ‘instant’ design experts. They confuse knowledge of how to be a designer – following steps described by a third party - with the actual ability and talent required to be a designer.
I wrote that, 'We, are witnessing a flood of 'Sunday designers', and the situation is only going to get worse. Several universities and educational institutions have introduced short courses to help students master 'design thinking', sometimes in as short a time as just a few days.’
4 lessons
So what’s to be done to combat such thinking?
Solman and Fernbach suggest guiding potential “Sunday designers” through 4 stages. These are: 1)Reduce complexity. 2) Employ simple decision rules. 3) Use Just-in-time education. 4) Check your understanding.
The benefit to the creative community is this. Instead of a short course offering the illusion of design expertise, following the four stages encourages would-be people to focus first on people, on the intended users for whom they’re designing. Not on becoming an instant design-expert.
And by doing that, they’ll be in a far better position – and possess the truly useful knowledge - to deliver relevant and meaningful solutions to the problems, unmet needs, and dreams of their target audiences.