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I am not afraid to admit that I am spatially challenged. Three bike workshops, a handful of online tutorials, a lifetime of watching my dad fix my bike – and I still don’t know which screws to turn which way to make my chain stop skipping. Is this the right screw to righty tighty? Or should it be lefty looseyed instead? I can see all the wires and gears that make this whole contraption work, so why can’t I figure out how it all fits together?
“It turns out people’s knowledge of how the world works is often fragmented and sketchy at best,” writes Thomas Blanchard, a cognitive scientist at Tufts University. “Just like how your knowledge of the world around you is imperfect, your knowledge about your own knowledge … is often flawed.”
Try to explain how a zipper works at the mechanical level or draw a penny with all the details from memory alone. You might find it harder than expected. This overconfidence in your knowledge of your own knowledge – also called metaknowledge – is surprisingly common, and it affects not only how you learn about the world, but also how you teach about the world.
Luckily, there are ways you can identify your own blind spots in expertise, as Blanchard explains in his article. And maybe that could help get you closer to that Socratic flavor of wisdom: “I know that I know nothing.”
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