The challenge of thinking you understand something you don’t is unfortunately a common one. Researcher Rebecca Lawson calls this the “illusion of explanatory depth.”11 At issue here is the notion that we judge our own learning competency, not directly but through various signals. Assessing whether or not we know a factual matter, such as what is th

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After having done this many times, my opinion is that the root cause of this is generally that many people who have a superficial understanding of topic assume that the topic is as complex as their understanding of the topic instead of realizing that only knowing a bit about a topic means that they're missing an understanding of the full complexity... See more