In a broader sense, I think that everyone here would benefit from reading this excerpt taken from a book called The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceive Us by Chris Chabris and Daniel Simons.
Pages 122 & 123.
We sometimes encounter students who come to our offices and ask how they could have worked so hard but still failed our tests. They usually tell us that they read and reread the textbook and their class notes, and that they thought they understood everything well by the time of the exam. And they probably did internalize some bits and pieces of the material, but the illusion of knowledge led them to confuse the familiarity they had gained from repeated exposure to the concepts in the course with an actual understanding of them. As a rule, reading text over and over again yields diminishing returns in actual knowledge, but it increases familiarity and fosters a false sense of understanding. Only by testing ourselves can we actually determine whether or not we really understand. That is one reason why teachers give tests, and why the best tests probe knowledge at a deep level. Asking whether a lock has cylinders tests whether people can memorize the parts of a lock. Asking how to pick a lock tests whether people understand why locks have cylinders and what functional role they play in the operation of the lock.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the illusion is how rarely we bother to do anything to probe the limits of our knowledge—especially considering how easy it is to do this. Before telling Leon Rozenblit that you know why the sky is blue, all you have to do is simulate the “why boy” game with yourself to see whether you actually know. We fall prey to the illusion because we simply do not recognize the need to question our own knowledge. According to Rozenblit,
In our day-to-day lives, do we stop and ask ourselves, “Do I know where the rain is coming from?” We probably don’t do it without provocation, and it only happens in appropriate social and cognitive contexts: a five-year-old asks you, you’re having an argument with someone, you’re trying to write about it, you’re trying to teach a class about it.
And even when we do check our knowledge, we often mislead ourselves. We focus on those snippets of information that we do possess, or can easily obtain, but ignore all of the elements that are missing, leaving us with the impression that we understand everything we need to. The illusion is remarkably persistent. Even after completing an entire experiment with Rozenblit, repeatedly playing the “why boy” game, some subjects still did not spontaneously check their own knowledge before proclaiming that they would have done better with different objects: “If you had just asked me about the lock, I could have done that.”
Our tendency to make this error isn’t limited to our thoughts and beliefs about physical devices and systems. It happens whenever we have a big project to complete, a problem to solve, or an assignment to do. We must overcome the temptation to dive in and get started rather than examine our understanding of the task and its requirements. Avoiding this aspect of the illusion of knowledge was the key for Tim Roberts, who won the $25,000 top prize in the 2008 edition of a computer programming tournament called the TopCoder Open. He had six hours to write a program that met a set of written specifications. Unlike his competitors, Roberts spent the first hour studying the specs and asking questions—“at least 30”—of their author. Only after verifying that he completely understood the challenge did he start to code. He completed a program that did exactly what was required, and nothing more. But it worked, and it was finished on time. The time he spent escaping the illusion of knowledge was an investment that paid off handsomely in the end.
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