Cognitive elaboration is, very roughly, synthesizing new information with other knowledge or otherwise playing around with information as a way of knitting it into our minds in ways we can use.

Most of the explanations that I think are in my brain are actually dotted lines in the shape of real explanations, but with very little inside them. They are ghosts of knowledge. And I won’t know what I don’t know until I fuck around and find out.

There are a lot of persuasive papers and books kicking around about social cognition, and the ones I’ve read so far land in essentially the same place. We mostly don’t know things, even though we believe we do, and this is mostly okay because we can either learn things as needed, as when we flip to YouTube to search why knenmore clothe dyrer make... See more

The knowledge substrate of our society has become increasingly loose and disorganized. It’s now composed of an extraordinary variety of highly disparate things that claim to be news, from vivid and skillful investigative reporting to openly partisan propaganda through the distributed op-ed cultures of podcasters,

Most of the explanations that I think are in my brain are actually dotted lines in the shape of real explanations, but with very little inside them. They are ghosts of knowledge. And I won’t know what I don’t know until I fuck around and find out.

But it also means that to care about and tend to our dissolute knowledge systems can be to care for and tend to our own understandings—not just to paternalistically seek to march other people forward like pawns toward attitude formation and political activation in ways we think are good. It is to de-instrumentalize our understandings of one another... See more

Even those of us who think we know things and believe that we’re “paying attention” know far less than we think we do. We are mostly skating on a brittle scrim of knowledge over an unperceived void, blithely trusting the resources around us to fill in for our spotty brains on a just-in-time basis.

There is a lot—like a lot a lot—of research suggesting that using social media to keep up with news does not actually inform us but does makes us feel more informed.