The key to the rise of Homo Sapiens and the anthropocene wasn’t due to the rationality of any individual human, but rather our collective unparalleled ability to think and share knowledge in large groups.

CIP

Source

Collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group’s capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals.

See also: Transformative Technology Trilemma

Knowledge Illusion

Humans also have this ‘knowledge illusion’ where we think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little.

If I were to ask you if you knew how a zipper works, the vast majority of you would exclaim “yes, of course!” Yet, if asked to describe in detail every single step, most would fail to do so. Even with something that seems so basic and intuitive seems to elude an explicit explanation.

We treat the knowledge of the human collective as if it were our own, even subconsciously.