Human expertise: it’s not what you know, it’s who…
 Sharing knowledge is a form of playing, say Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. And it depends heavily on others
So how can we get around, sound knowledgeable and take ourselves seriously while understanding only a tiny fraction of what there is to know?
The answer is that we do so by living a lie. We tell ourselves that we understand what’s going on, that our opinions are justified by our knowledge and that our actions are grounded in justified beliefs, even though they are not. We tolerate complexity by failing to recognise it. That’s the illusion of understanding.
So how can humanity achieve so much when people are so ignorant? It turns out we have been very successful at dividing up our cognitive labour. We would not be such competent thinkers if we had to rely only on the limited knowledge stored in our heads and our facility for causal reasoning. The secret to our success is that we live in a world in which knowledge is all around us.
(via Human expertise: it’s not what you know, it’s who… | Life and style | The Guardian)