We, contemporary humans, are surrounded by marvels. We have tools that make our dwellings colder or warmer on demand to the highest precision and variable preferences. We don’t rely just on the sun as we can get bright lights outdoors on indoors at any point in time. We even control those lights with voice. We made objects to store our food for prolonged weeks and to cook it instantaneously when desured. We use these tools so frequently that due to their practicality we consider them very facile. Almost no one gapes or gawks at vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. We think we know how they work, yet I challenge you to explain to 5 years old how a refrigerator works. In fact, this exercise made me realize that all my life I had no idea how a refrigerator works.
This phenomenon has recently been termed as an Illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). “people believe they understand the world more deeply than they actually do and only realize that this belief is an illusion when they attempt to explain elements of the world”1. Forget about trivia or discussions on the morality of artificial intelligence - try explaining in five steps how a sewing machine works. Only by forcing yourself to explain does it become apparent how little one understands.
The way to avoid the IOED, as well as learn about anything the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman proposes the following steps:
1. Choose a concept you want to learn about
2. Pretend you are teaching it to a student in grade 6
3. Identify gaps in your explanation; Go back to the source material, to better understand it.
4. Review and simplify (optional)
This is known as the Feynman Learning Technique and it is a great solution to any illusions about our own understandings.
This week, as I was pondering on the utilitarian beauty of surrounding objects, my sister has sent me “The Way Things Work” - “The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Technology by Bibliographisches Institute . The book was published in 1963(!), yet it is brilliant in terms of explaining how anything works from semiconductors to zippers. I have spent 20 minutes reading just a chapter on dry cleaning feeling deeply ashamed that all this time as the clean clothes were magically delivered from dry cleaners I had no understanding how it became clean.
Further reading:
An iconic piece designed by Eileen Gray for E 1027, this table, often called Cabinet à tiroirs pivotantes (Cabinet with pivoting drawers), was directly inspired by Vorticism, the movement founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis, one of Gray’s close friends and a classmate at both the Slade School of Fine Art in London and the Académie Julian in Paris. This small storage cabinet, intended for the living room, is doubly inventive: placed against one of the posts built into the wall that divides a row of bay windows, it occupies and separates space; at the same time, the back hides a set of four hidden drawers that only appear when they pivot open, increasing the visual dynamism of the form. The contrast between the sliding and pivoting drawers, which join inside the piece, recalls the geometric patterns in Lewis’s paintings.
“What’s life ? A frenzied, blurry haze.
What’s life ? Not anything it seems.
A shadow. Fiction filling reams.
All we possess on earth means nil,
For life’s a dream, think what you will,
And even all our dreams are dreams.”
“/Life Is a Dream/“ by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
A Death in Teheran
A rich and mighty Persian once walked in the garden with his servant. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give fastest horse so that he can make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned it, “Who did you terrify and threatened my servant?” I did not threaten him, I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran” said Death.
Identity economics captures the idea that people make economic choices based on both monetary incentives and their identity: holding monetary incentives constant, people avoid actions that conflict with their concept of self.