Known Unknowns vs Unknown Unknowns: Two Sides of Ignorance

The main reason for the ignorance of our own ignorance is that we don’t need to know how everyday things work. They just do. We are used to seeing them wherever we go.

Immediate access to knowledge makes us all feel like experts, when in reality we're not. And we certainly don’t consider ourselves to be stupid when we can research anything.

But it’s not just the rapid access to information that makes us fall for the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, it’s the way we consume this information.

We browse the top of news items, we choose clickbait-y headlines and we allow tweets to inform us of global political moves. We tap into viral videos, we listen to soundbites and agree with memes.

This is a superficial way of ingesting knowledge. We never really deep dive into a topic. As a result, we know a lot of stuff, but not in that much detail: we know a little bit about a lot.