You Don't Know Anything - The Illusion of Explanatory Depth - FutureIQ

2,516 views Wait, is this logic right? • Dec 01, 2023

Slog Reference: Overconfidence and the Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Description

Have you ever thought that you know a thing well but diving a little deep, you realize you don't know it as much? This is the concept called the illusion of explanatory depth. This explains our inability to explain things we think we know a lot of. Let's see how it applies in our lives and how you can stay avoid looking like an overconfident person who doesn't really know anything.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Books mentioned in the video:
Antifragile: https://tapthe.link/csrU2hjqE

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

More videos for you:
Why idiots think they're smart: https://youtu.be/GtmcY3t5hB4
Deliberate practice: https://youtu.be/tysT6DMFGH4
The Dip: https://youtu.be/NFqC7mlZlQw

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:50 The experiment
04:32 The explanation
05:50 WhatsApp forwards & more scenarios
08:00 The effective way to learning
09:53 How to avoid this?
12:13 The OODA loop

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Overconfidence and the Illusion of Explanatory Depth

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Transcript

- so we did a small exercise in the office today uh at the studios today and what we did was we asked people to draw a bicycle from memory most people have seen a bicycle so many times that they think this is going to be roughly easy we're not asking for an artistic bike just a schematic of where the different parts are in relation where's the handle where's the body where are the wheels where is the gear system and chains and whatnot just that much nothing nothing fancy we don't want like a real life drawing if you want you can actually try this exercise right now pause the video do it and then continue from where it is

0m 39s and we'll tell you what happened the collage that you see on the screen that is what happened this these are some of the examples of the bicycles drawn by people when we as them to draw a bicycle from memory now be in mind all of these people have seen bicycles all of these people were confident that they can draw a bicycle cycle we've ridden them so many times this is what they do the intention isn't to make fun of these people okay all of us have this problem me Shri Kant and I'm sure you right things that we see on a regular basis uh and we use them we somehow convince ourselves that we understand how they work so for example

1m 21s a spray bottle or like a sanitizer uh squirt bottle right we think we understand how it works so I press and there is pressure and things come out right a ballpen yeah how does a ballpen work how does an electric motor work right or how does a car turn I mean are the wheels going the same distance turning the same number of times or not not they're not how does scuba diving work a whole bunch of these things we did an experiment in office we've asked people to rate from 1 to seven how well they understood and for the ones they said they understood reasonably well we asked followup questions like for example for a spray bottle

2m 01s if I put pressure and the pressure pulls the liquid up why is that pressure allowing the liquid to escape why isn't it pulling it back yeah why isn't this liquid also coming back and getting pressed back what is happening there so for a ballpen what exactly is happening why is this ink which kind of looks solid write very smoothly when I'm writing but when I just hold it like this and I shake it like this it's not flying around right or for a car when it is turning if I take a turn the inner wheel is going a smaller outer wheel is going a greater distance yeah so are they turning the same number of times or

2m 41s is it turning more is the they are not is the outer wheel turning more than you know they're connected like aren't they connected like this or not yeah if you think of two wheels at the end of this and the car turns like this this wheel is obviously not rotating as much as this other wheel on the outside how is that happening what is the magic there a whole bunch of things and then after we asked this follow-up question and people realized that some of the things they could answer some they couldn't everybody reduced their scores of how much they knew answers to those and of course we are not so smart that we came

3m 17s up with this ourselves right this is a well-known experiment conducted by researchers uh and they they call this the illusion of explanatory depth right and this has been replicated many times over and over again they have found the same thing we are all overconfident we think we understand how things work because we sort of hear an explanation by someone or we just see it happening and we're like okay yeah that seems to make sense um right so um yeah for example if I take a SLR camera right in the viewfinder if I look at it I am seeing the same thing which is going to be on film whereas the truth is what you're seeing from the viewfinder level

4m 04s and what you're seeing and what the camera uh is seeing at the um what do you call it the the the the sensor level they are two different views technically how are they the same why are they the same more importantly if you have ever seen a pinhole camera uh in school you know that the image inside a camera is upside down and why are you seeing it straight in theer right how are you seeing it straight in the so many things so many things we just sort of assume that we know how the world works but we don't the illusion of explanatory depth well uh there's a different statement which we probably will do another

4m 43s episode on is that reality contains a surprising amount of detail right our brains are experts at simplifying things to a point where we think we understand them and then we can keep everything in our head so that we do not get overwhelmed by oh my God everything in the world is so complex and I don't understand anything right it's so much better that everything in the world is easy and you know I understand most of the things yeah there are at least 10 different shades of green in this one single frame that you're looking at at least 10 different shades of green yeah that's just an example of how many uh what the level of detail there is in

5m 24s reality the biggest impact of this experiment um when naven did on me was I suddenly went very Socratic in my Approach and went I I don't know anything I don't know anything in life N I don't know anything in life so first of all I mean before this experiment most people overestimate their understanding of the world but the world contains a surprising amount of detail right especially whenever we read an explanation when we get a forward on WhatsApp right we think we understand things we think we understand complex politics right and we think of why doesn't they do this it's so simple and the answer is it's not simple but we don't realize it okay because there are

6m 11s usually gaps in any explanation but our brain just coolly Smooths them over and prevents us from seeing uh the gaps right the details the gaps in those explanations just because social media and WhatsApp and TV and videos on YouTube right they keep sending the simp explanations to us and this availability of a lot of information is confusing us with understanding right just because there's a lot of information doesn't mean that it is complete or correct right so you might uh when naen said videos on YouTube you might think uh naen your episodes are also trying to simplify things so are you also smoothing over the gaps to some extent yes I think importantly I view our

7m 02s episodes as being something that arouses curiosity yeah so you want to find out more and ideally you want to go and do more things yourself right and that is the intent of this entire series to arouse that Curiosity in you so you go and do further research so and one more example I'll give right when I first read about the illusion of explanatory depth that was probably like 6 seven years ago I read it oh yes I understand this is how it is right for this episode I actually did that experiment here and for it I just realized oh I didn't think of this I didn't think of that I didn't think of that and I had to put in much

7m 42s more effort to do that experiment than I had originally imagined and even then there are still some gaps and if I want to do it again uh there's a whole bunch of other things I would have to do in fact that paper I read far more carefully because I wanted to do the experiment than I had ever done in my life right so this is an important part learn if you learn by doing you learn far more okay as opposed to you'll just read about it that is true that is true you learn far better when you're actually doing something than just reading about it or there's another important uh way okay of learning right

8m 22s which is that I'll describe an experiment to you sure go ahead so um there were a group of people and they were all told they're going to be taught something uh complicated okay and one of them was told that you will be asked to go and explain this thing to a different group okay who is not in the room right now right and then those guys will be tested and these guys will be tested okay so my success depends on the other group doing well right at the end of this whole exercise they tested they did not care about the other group only in the first group itself they saw the difference in scores between the person

9m 07s who was told he will have to explain it and the rest of the people and the person who had to explain it scored far better than the others because the person who had to explain it understood the concept from the perspective of explaining it to another person you learn you pay much more attention in fact if they had made the person go and explain that person while explaining would have realized a whole bunch of other gaps in understanding and would would have gone and looked up things right so teaching is one of the best ways of learning right there's no better way to understand gaps in your knowledge than trying to teach it to someone who's

9m 53s going to ask questions how do I prevent this from happening right yeah so I think one is of course uh you know if you ever get a chance to teach something you should go for it um if you try get a chance to explain it to other people go for it or maybe just train yourself to always think of okay this you know maybe I'll have to explain this to someone else but the best way is of course to actually do something right the way I mean this illusion of explanatory depth is only for these Concepts complicated Concepts where this thing leads to this thing leads to this thing if it is some procedural knowledge how do you cook

10m 35s something right those things people remember easily there is no that level uh uh complication uh if you say that you can make uh a good upma you probably can make a good upma I can right uh so procedural things are easy things that involve actions are easy I mean there are no gaps there right so try to do things uh better than reading is uh actually explaining better than explaining is actually doing right and not necessarily that you do the whole thing right you do smaller experiments do uh parts of things right but just in general tinkering right in fact this is uh in our new education policy also that there should be tinkering labs in

11m 21s schools government is paying for a lot of them so uh there nothing preventing us adults from also doing things like that right keep doing things keep tinkering with things keep building little things right U it could be in a computer like building websites building little uh things it could be not related to technology right I mean if you could write articles to some extent arts and crafts also counts as tinkering with creativity yeah so Creation in general creation is a good thing right that helps you understand your gaps when you try to create create things H um yeah so create websites create Arts create crafts work with uh broken electronics at home try and figure out different ways of doing

12m 12s it one important thing I want to point out here right there a connection to a different concept I keep talking about which is that whenever you're doing something big uh right there are two ways in which people approach that one is do a lot of planning think through all the possibilities then come up with a strategy and then come up with a detailed uh plan and then implement it right the other way is to just have a rough plan start something see how it went learn from that then uh do the next thing and go in a loop right I keep talking about the UDA Loop do something observe I knew he was going to orient

12m 53s yourself decide what is the next thing you want to do and then a act and then repeat this the faster the loop the better you are a different principle related to the same thing is antifragile by Talib right that uh you make mistakes learn from the mistakes uh trying to avoid mistakes entirely is a problem connection to this episode is that this big plan you are going to make in the beginning that is bound to fail because you are overconfident about the details right because you haven't actually done anything your big plan is going to have gaps that you don't even realize are there right and those gaps will only come out when you're actually trying to

13m 36s implement the plan by which time it'll be probably too late yes yeah so uh go ahead and uh Implement an UDA Loop of course we are going to do an extensive episode on the UDA Loop because we've teased it far too many times now and we need to do like a detailed episode on the UDA loop as quickly as possible so the key takeaways that I'm getting from this entire explanation of the illusion of explanatory depth is that a action is more important than analysis and uh B uh just because someone tells you they know what they are doing or just because someone tells you uh a certain way in which it needs to be done doesn't mean

14m 19s it's always true I mean one is that your understanding is likely to be not good and second is that very likely even they have the illusion of explanatory depth right you have to dig in to see if they have actually done anything about it or they are just giving Gan which they have learned from somewhere else H so the next time you get a degree from WhatsApp University yes please check the credentials of the professor who granted you that degree please more than credentials check the track record that's the point the illusion of explanatory depth it affects us in ways we don't even know because our brain tends to gloss over a lot of things yeah and which is why the

15m 05s concept of Illusion of explanatory depth which I thought I understood before giving you Gan in this episode I actually implemented it earlier today we did that and that is why we are able to tell you with confidence that it works yes we did not fall for the illusion of explanatory depth we actually went into depth and looked at how it panned out which is why this this is Shri Kant naen future IQ thank you thank you for watching till the end if you like this episode check out these others you might like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will also like these thank you