Ignorance Is Bliss, Illusion Is Not
Everybody knows that they don’t know enough about the world.
Where people disagree though, is how much exactly they know. “Maybe I don’t know about rocket science or self-driving cars”, you might say, “but I know enough about the world”. That’s enough for me.
It sounds reasonable, but even then, there’s a good chance you may be taking too much credit. Complexity exists all around us.
Take a minute and try to explain what happens when you flush a toilet. If you’re like me, you’ll be stumped when asked to explain the principles that govern the toilet’s operation.
As Steven Slomach and Philip Fernbach tell us in The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone:
“To fully understand toilets requires more than a short description of its mechanism. It requires knowledge of ceramics, metal, and plastic to know how the toilet is made; of chemistry to understand how the seal works so the toilet doesn’t leak onto the bathroom floor; of the human body to understand the size and shape of the toilet.”
That’s a lot of crap that goes into toilets. It certainly isn’t as simple as we thought before.
