The Importance of Understanding

We rely on our communities to a great extent to have beliefs and positions about the world. If someone else understands a particular thing, we tend to rate our own understanding of it higher than if we don't know that somebody else understands it. This is exactly the right phenomenon to be querying us about because this really captures the essence of the book. And so the ideas that we get our sense of understanding from the people around us. Understanding is like a virus, which we can catch. So we might have a sense of understanding. But they might only have a senseof understanding. Because the people around them think they have an understanding.