law professor angela date. the impact on african american men. they offer his thoughts on the media. the journalist recalls the total solar eclipse of 1878. and we visit the literary sites of several cities across the nation. that all happens this weekend on book tv. television for serious readers. for complete tv schedule visit book tv.org. we kick off the weekend with the cosmic div scientist. scientist. should we set, or should we wait. welcome everyone. thank you very much.

we are delighted to have you at this event. they are featuring stephen from the right university. why would never think alone. is also the editor of the very first journal cause nexgen. the profession he also holds joint -- joint appointments before we begin i ask that you please silence your phones if you have not already i should also introduce myself. i'm the director of the mit press. it's a pleasure to welcome you. we just started doing the

series of events. and they been incredibly successful if you are enjoying this we should say that we do announce the next one coming up. with the immigration and the american backlash. tonight's event will last for approximately 45 to 50 minutes before the book signing. we will talk off -- to talk about stephen talking about the book. we will moderate a conversation with the audience before we actually do the signing. after the presentation the books will be available for a 20% discount.

i and the guy needed this mike. thank you so much. in the 40s. we are still trying to perfect the atomic bomb. these are people who know atomic physics better than anybody. they were developing the bomb they call us in this room. as an experiment that the famous physicist called tickling the dragon's tail. it involves taking two hemispheres that had that together. even neutrons would start shuffling back and forth was

really dangerous. you could have a lot of radioactivity. so the main physicist. he was keeping this separated by a flat have screwdriver. so what happens the screwdriver slips the hemisphere came together radiation filled the room and he was dead within nine days. they died young. probably from the effects of this radioactivity. the question and the question posed by the book is how can such smart people be so stupid. the first claim made by the book is that people are relatively ignorant. and as a fact in the sense that 25 percent of americans don't know that the earth

revolves around the sun. 50% don't know that penicillin kills bacteria and not viruses. they make fun of this fact all the time. many people can't name the vice president of the united states. the real point of the book is that people think they understand is better than they do. the main form of evidence originated with the great psychologist. and what he did was ask people to think about simple every day objects in the as people how will they understood these things and they felt like they have a sense of understanding. okay how do they work.

for the most part they just did not understand how the simple everyday objects worked. the acts of trying to explain punctured their understanding such that they lost some of that. and what i have done with some colleagues at harvard and craig fox at ucla. it is to take this paradigm and run it in in the context of political policy. should there be sanctions on iran. should there be cap and trade policies. we ask you how will they understand them. we say how does it work. explain how this thing works.

when we get asked them what their sense of understanding is it is lower. they become less extreme. and reduced polarization in reduce polarization in the group. simply by asking from an explanation. this is something that is probably true for only certain kinds of political issues. namely those that really rests on that. the mechanism by which it operates that really counts. what matters is how it affects people. there are other issues like abortion or assisted suicide which really aren't about the

consequences so much as basic values. with some data suggesting the same thing. the next thing we do in the book is try to explain why this is the case. why is it that people live in a solution of understanding. and the answer we offer is that it is because we confuse what we know with what other people know. there other people who know how ballpoint pens work. and therefore we think we do. therefore we think we do. we failed to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads in the knowledge that is in other peoples have. we live in a community of knowledge. so the thought itself is a collaborative process.

it involves a team and does not is not solely go on inside this. let me quickly describe an experiment that i ran with an undergrad at brown. we told people about a scientific phenomenon something we made up. a system of helium rain which my real scientific friends tell tommy is actually possible. we made it up. the scientist discovered this thing. but they haven't explained yet. they understand how it works. they've discovered it. and not surprisingly people said and understand it all. another group same thing scientists had discovered the system of helium rain. they understand how it works.

and now people say they feel like they fully understand helium rain but there is a little in understanding that is attributable to the fact that people understand the get them no information about it. and now they understand. take about this in the context of say the last election. imagine everyone around you thinks they understand why hillary is crooked. let's be fair maybe everybody around you thinks they understand why diversity is affected. merely the fact that everybody else understands if understanding is contagious in the way we are suggesting it's good to give you a sense of understanding. and if everybody says that has a sense of understanding.

then we can have a lot of confidence in belief based on nothing. finally the last thing we do in the book as we draw out the implications of these ideas for a number of things. science, literacy, our understanding of intelligence, decision-making, technology and other things i'm not remembering at the moment. that's of the book is about. as a reader of the book. and someone that has worked on the related things i really found much that was new and led me to think about different problems and things in a different way. if you are not in syria it is

a great want to read as well. maybe we can put you on the couch or as an author of the book. it's really interesting especially when someone writes a book like that. the ghost through the editorial process and so on. think about the deeper motivation for it. and then have a follow-up question. the innocent question is in the sense that the knowledge solution is a bad thing is not so obvious that it is about the. one would say the knowledge illusion shows that we are a species and we rely on others and if we take that away. we would be locked into her own individual selves. is it a bad thing that there is a knowledge illusion.

>> i thought juergen asked me about my childhood. i think you're absolutely right when it comes to ballpoint pens and toilets and zippers. it's not bad thing at all. there is a solution. many other domains of life in our spiritual lives there is no problem with the fact that we think together as a team. in indeed it is a great way to solve problems. in fact it kind of relieves us of a burden we will have to understand everything if we accept the fact about ourselves and our own ignorance than life is easier. in fact we got an e-mail from this one guy who said he suffered his whole life with

some kind of mental disorder. he did not elaborate what it was. and it was such a relief for him to learn that it was okay to be ignorant. in that regard i agree completely. i just think there are certain domains in which there are ill effects in i think populism and politics is something that can cause a lot of damage. i'm worried about the state of the world right now. and i think it has something to do with the fact that we are living with this set of beliefs and ideology that doesn't really have a firm grant. there are other ill effects also. i think they could probably work better together if the individuals and the teams had more respect for the point of view of others. both in the large-scale in a small.

i do think that there are prescriptions that could be derived from these insights. but overall i agree with you completely. there is not a problem or an inherent problem. i have a related question. it has to do with the general topic in the collective knowledge. it has been in the popular imagination the last ten or 15 years. the question is motivated by is there particular political preference and i will raise it with an example that's not in your book. it turns out that prediction markets are partly a new instrument for aggregating information. much of the interest they're at least knowing the

individuals who are pushing this comes from a libertarian anti- elitist agenda where you don't want to trust those experts. you everyone in a democratic way to see that. in your book it seems that one of the themes as we can claim too much knowledge on our own part. and our contribution is smaller than we think. it seems to have that we should understand to what extent we are really a very small part of the whole. is that motive were a theme in the background. and is in the background is in the foreground. it's not a motive. it's a fact.

that is definitely an implication of the book. and it's an implication that i would be willing to defend in the domain of prediction markets actually didn't do that. we talked about them little bit in the book. i was not aware that they came out of the libertarian perspective it seems to me that much of the value of prediction markets is that there is a mean of taking them out. the people who are willing to pay the most to risk the most on their position should be the people who know the most. they will have the most accurate predictions. i always thought that was the reason that prediction mars gets were successful.

there is other evidence showing that the people who are most confident actually know the least not the most. david has done a lot of work showing that simply asking people what their views are on various issues and then measuring their knowledge about the backgrounds of those issues and finding the people that do the worst. they are the ones who are most confident about their opinions. it was a great experiment we mentioned in a book they asked the group to locate the ukraine on a map. and most people were way off some people got pretty close. they also ask these people how positive they were that the u.s. should intervene in the war on the crimea and the people that were most often locating this were the ones

most confident that the u.s. should intervene. that is an example of how knowledge actually leads to to lack of confidence. and in the case of prediction markets i just assumed it was true expertise. i was thinking that the idea would be you would not need a phd or credentials to vote on what should be done with the patient and so on. is one take one more quick question which goes march --dash mike more to the research people confuse their own confidence with how much they think some information is generally shared. you had results that it really

matters whether you believe someone else know something or not. it also has to be assessable is that right. in the contagious understanding experiment. what i described earlier we have a condition in which the researchers worked for the defendants intelligence agency and in one condition they understood the phenomenon but it was secret. some people have no access to it. and the question was would know it and that the knowledge was out there but also knowing that you the judge have no access to that that also increases your sense of understanding. the answer is it didn't. knowing that others understand that.

it increases the sense of understanding but only if you can access that knowledge. there is evidence that if you been searching google for answers to questions then you feel like you are better question answer. i think we should give the audience a chance not to ask questions. i'm wondering why i should buy your book. what mckenna benefit. i already knew them. you arty know what we have to

offer. i bear two main lessons. there are a lot of main lessons that i think the book draws. no one in this room i'm sure. and second the reason for this is because we should think about thought as a communal enterprise. not something that's going on inside the head. i'm glad you already know that. it's true. i can tell you they assume that it does go on inside the

head. that is how you talk about it. so everyone in this room probably agrees that they have made a court basis. probably almost no one in this room has actually replicated in the experiments that cause us to know these things. it seems like you are reiterating my point that we

feel like we understand these things. and actually if we took a poll. fewer people in this room know those things than you think. maybe i'm wrong. so exactly. one point of communal knowledge is that we depend on work done by others. they depend entirely it seems to be the point you're making. most of the methodologies that we use. we don't replicate them. i depend on what other people

now. i couldn't agree more. as far as a defining knowledge. as a separate issue that maybe we can talk about later. i was thinking about what you are saying. give any thoughts as to the different groups of people may have different assumed knowledge from each other. i'm thinking about people in academia. even if they are approaching. if they approach it in a different way. the author talks about some

really interesting adventures. some of the people who come up with it have really good solutions to things. and maybe a different knowledge base. the people that solve the problems. i'm just thinking if we have any thoughts about that. i think what you're pointing out so eloquently there is a division of cognitive labor and we are all experts in one or two narrow areas in that to accomplish anything we need expertise that are distributed

across the range i think society is structured to a large degree in accordance with what i'm talking about. we each head our own narrow area of expertise. we have to divide up cognitive labor. we need someone's who is there. all of these different expertise. and so what you're pointing out i think is that society is taking that into account in the reason we are able to build iphones.

we are already doing it for the most part. what lessons there are about how you can do this better. the little bit i would say about that is we could have a little less about our expertise in areas beyond our own narrow field. we should better appreciate exactly what you're saying. the other people do all kinds of useful things and had useful knowledge that we don't had direct access too. [inaudible] i think of this knowledge as a

bubble. it's basically breaking up bubble with awareness that is there. let's say i'm a leader and have a team. or be aware of this. i want you to give me a suggestion of how can they tell me that this is important to make very big decisions. there are others. i am not going to give them a test. and tell them you're less than you think you know. in a way that doesn't need to read your book. or give them a test. that is a great question. i will not offer a satisfying answer.

i think anybody has a satisfied the one thing i will say is getting people to focus on mechanism. the primary experiment of the paper i think the basic idea that the best way to persuade someone is to have them persuade themselves. the way to do that in this case is to ask people for an account. indeed we had run this. we burst people's illusions of understanding by asking them to explain. and then we see now and they want to learn more.

will be open to new information. the answer is no. they really don't want to talk to you anymore. it's a fine line. getting people to see what they can do and that's an art. two questions that are related. understanding my fake news is so successfully spreading. many people believe in these and then i would like to know

whether the phenomenon you describe is changing. there are many people that there is polarization. and does this correspond with an increase in confidence in your opinions and does increase in ignorance in some way. the basic idea that we live in a community of knowledge and that the mind is built for collaboration i take to be basic facts about humanity that have been true since the beginning of time. what is changing it seems to me that america has not faced the dynamics that is facing now.

the internet has changed everything. it's not like we now live in these bubbles that have firmer walls because we are cut off from the people who live next door. they have the same political perspective. and that in turn is made worse that much of our news is individualized. we are seeing only what we want to see. it tends to be stuff we agree with. our buzz bowls are bibles are getting firmer and firmer for that reason. the old sound leadership is disappearing we know people don't go to church as much said the don't hear this, voice. that delivers the same

perspective on the news regardless of the members political persuasion. and then had there had been a lot of people have have the changes in demographics. they are moving more to the city. outside of the city. and to just acquire them in the first place. one way to characterize the point of the book is to say that rather than thinking of people as rational processors of information we should think about people channeling their communities. what this implies about a fake news is good news and bad news about that.

the bad news as it is the means by which people acquire their beliefs to a large degree. if we just chill our community and it's telling us all of the stuff that's not true this can make a big difference to what we believe. the good news is i'm not sure it matters so much in the sense that whether the news is real or fake people are gonna believe what their community tells them to believe anyway. so it's not obvious to me that fake news is having a huge effect on the distribution of belief. a lot to be said about that.

i want to ask you about two different things. for americans and adults and particularly people from very different cultures. great question. i have no reason to think that they wouldn't have no reason to think that bushman and the kalahari live more inside their own individual minds than anybody else. i assume they are also collaborators and team players. that i think is the source of the illusion. my prediction would be they would indeed show the illusions. it is harder to show with those populations.

i would like to ask you about reasoning and the difference between individual and group reasoning. the theory of reasoning. is just that it is something that developed as a social rather than individual activity. to find the truth individually. it should therefore be more powerful or more effective. on the other hand there is other planning that when people try to persuade each other. you have this effect. and you end up mobilizing that which actually ends and leave them with a resource in

original belief. if group reasoning somehow is more powerful than individual reasoning. it is on my bedside table. i have to answer yes to the final question. it has to be more powerful because that is the nature of reasoning. i think thinking about what goes on inside the head i am a two system theorist. we will see patterns and make predictions.

it is intuitive in the sense that we see what the outcome is even though we don't see what the process is. i would distinguish that. i love this word the liberation because it plays on two different senses of deliberation. even think of as a cognitive process. the process of thought. and the process that goes on inside the head. but deliberation is also something that happens between people. we do that but i agree with them that we do that how do do that on a group level.

i think story telling is at least if not more important than argumentation. they are all kinds of systems. that we pass and discuss eventually. it is an old trick. for asking the person question. as one that you want to do.

question of rhetoric. the standard of advice. that they can re-create that argument. and then this is really there. if you want to put me in the same camp i'm perfectly happy with that. a lot of these ideas have a long history. when kyle would generally did this work he showed that people suffer from the illusion with regard to their understanding about how things work. but they don't show it with respect to narratives or script or fax leak that.

it's a very specific kind of allusion or it was but the one domain in which his student showed that it also came as in the domain of logical justification. people do apparently have the sense that they can justify their beliefs to a greater extent than they can. i think matt has a question. so how do people know what confidence you're asking about when you say do you understand helium rain. if the student of mine asks you understand that no go. i will go there.

if my broker asks it's a different one. when you ask these questions what do you think these people are thinking. we provide the scale. one is completely unfamiliar with it. and then we go we do try to defined understanding. people can understand what you're saying and lots of ways and the word understanding is vague they could understand it to mean many different things. under the contagious understanding experiment what

we show is that simply saying other people understand causes people to put a higher number down on the scale. so what exactly does this mean. it is higher than the number that the people put down when the scientist don't understand. people have a greater sense of it. the argument of climate change in the political arena. i know we have to go with alternative energy. if you would ask me to explain i don't think i could either. so why should i be so proud of myself you don't know what

you're talking about. we all rely on expertise. i believe the upwards of 90% of scientists who study the stuff. they only believe in climate change. this is a problem. there is some uncertainty that comes from the fact that we have to trust our experts.

i cannot fix the toilet by myself. as a hard problem. i'm wondering if they can comment on the people that are most most often been. and maybe the academics may might be part of this group. there are individuals that are subject for that. they might believe therefore the subject matter is in one area.

i can't speak about that last issue. i can tell you that the people who really suffer from the knowledge illusion aren't people who are not reflective. some of you may be familiar with this reflection a test. and essentially it asks whether people tell you what is on their mind immediately or whether they verify before telling you what's on their mind. how many animals of each kind did moses put on the arc.

and the difference is they are generating the response is not reflective. to comes everybody's mind. in other people and verified that. people that suffer from the knowledge illusion tend to be the non- reflective tape. how will do they understand. people who are reflective think and try to explain how it worked. our scientist more reflective. on average yes. it would be nonreflective.

i hate to say it mit as well as harvard students and all kinds of others. it still the case that wall of her half turned out to be not reflective. including some in this room. in the financial markets as we keep listening to this at some level all of them are there. and there is nobody standing on the other side. the only people that go out and say that the actual thinking. and that goes for the side.

in the entire life. i would never argue that we shouldn't had should have developed critical reasoning skills. i brought that part of the decision-making and i've tried to learn statistics and i try not to commit various fallacies. we shouldn't necessarily but don't mistake not following the herd with always been right.

often it is right. i wouldn't necessarily call semi irrational just somebody irrational just because they don't follow the herd. i would call them irrational if there is no basis for their beliefs are. if it is a community of scientists at least in most domains. they are different and special that way. i will let those who understand financial markets speak to this. but clearly following the herd can earn you a lot of money at least for a while.

so we had run out of time. thank you very much. we have a short book signing. and you are also walk up to buy them there. [inaudible] you're watching book tv on c-span two. forty-eight hours of non- fiction authors and books. television for serious readers. h