Do You Really Know What You’re Doing?

You know how a zipper works, right? OK, then explain it out loud. Right now.

You’ll get about eight seconds in before you realize you have no idea what you’re talking about.

“OK, so… There are teeth. The slider goes up, and it pulls the teeth together. So something in the slider probably connects them…”

Yale researchers ran this exact test in 2002. They asked participants to rate how well they understood everyday devices like a zipper or a toilet on a scale of 1-7.

Average: 3.9.

Then they had those same participants write out step by step how a zipper worked, and re-rate their level of understanding:

Average: 3.1.

Then they asked questions about the devices—like “How would you pick a lock?”—and had participants rate themselves again.

Average: 2.5.

Researchers called it “the illusion of explanatory depth.” It shows up most strongly with how things work. Ask people what the capital of Peru is and they know whether they know it. Ask them how a toilet works and they think they know until they try to explain it.

The illusion isn’t new. What’s new is that you used to get caught. The zipper would break, your kid would ask how to fix it, and you’d hear yourself trail off and realize you had no idea what you were talking about.

It was embarrassing, and it happened to everybody, and it was the only mechanism any of us had for finding out that we were full of—

AI has removed that mechanism. Now if you don’t understand something, you can just ask ChatGPT, read the explanation on your phone, pretend like you understand it, and retain nothing.

Which would be harmless, except that researchers gave ChatGPT to about 1,000 high school kids in Turkey and watched what happened over a semester of math classes.

With the AI helping, the students scored 48% higher on practice problems than the kids working alone. On the exam, with the AI gone, they scored 17% worse.

And when researchers asked them afterward how they thought they’d done, they didn’t think anything had gone wrong at all—they felt like they’d learned it.

The feeling of understanding and actual understanding are two different things, and being handed the answers gives you the first one without the second.

See you Monday,
Mark Manson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
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