You’re sitting in a meeting. Someone is explaining something complicated. The words sound good, the sentences follow a clear structure, and at the end you nod. Everyone nods. It makes sense.
Later, alone, you try to reconstruct what exactly you understood. And you realise: nothing. You had heard words, and you had nodded. The thing itself is gone, as if it had never been there.
What’s unsettling is that you didn’t notice at the time.
For years we have been talking about fake news, about disinformation, about lies that have been shown to spread faster on Twitter than the truth. The problem is real, and others have written about it at length.
But fake news triggers something. Sooner or later someone checks the fact, a news outlet runs the correction, someone sends you a link showing the story isn’t true. The mechanism isn’t perfect – plenty still seeps through – but it exists. Contradiction is possible because the lie can be recognised as a lie once someone looks closely.
Alongside it there is a phenomenon that triggers no warning. It invites no fact check, because nothing about it is demonstrably false.
I call it sham understanding: the feeling of having understood something without actually having understood it. When the explanation comes from outside, from a person or a system, something else is added, which I call borrowed confidence: the feeling of being informed because someone delivered an explanation to you. Whom you borrow this confidence from when the supplier is a machine is one of the questions my book, written in German, pursues.
From the inside, no alarm goes off. “I’ve understood it” and “It felt as if I’d understood it” are barely distinguishable.
The difference lies elsewhere, and it can be named precisely. Real understanding means you can predict what a thing does and explain why. And that you notice when your explanation doesn’t hold. Real understanding gives you the capacity to act.
The feeling of understanding needs none of that. It needs a surface that can be read off, and the absence of friction. When an explanation sounds smooth, raises no questions and never trips you up, it feels like understanding.
As long as nobody follows up, as long as you don’t have to apply anything, the illusion stays intact. Until the moment someone says: explain that to me quickly. And you stall.
It goes unnoticed for so long because fake news can be publicly refuted, while sham understanding stays private.
It produces no contradiction; it produces satisfaction. The feeling lives in you, and nobody has access to it but you. You are exactly the person who doesn’t notice it.
Strictly speaking, the feeling doesn’t even lie. It reports familiarity, and you read understanding into it. Whether the two coincide depends on whether you are trained in the matter. A doctor who has seen thousands of patients can trust her feeling about a diagnosis to a fair degree. After a fluent explanation of a subject outside your experience, the two almost never coincide.
And the feeling doesn’t know whether it is trained.
Media literacy, fact checks, critical reading – all of that works against recognisable lies. Against sham understanding it only works once you turn it on yourself. The words were correct, the explanation was plausible. All that was missing was your understanding.
So you need tests that start with you. Can you explain it? Can you apply it? Can you predict what happens when a condition changes?
It gets even harder to check when the explanation agrees with you. Late one evening I wanted nothing more than confirmation for a decision I had to defend in front of the executive board the next morning, and I got it, fluent and with a technical term. Why that very thing should have made me suspicious, I tell in my book, in the chapter on the flattering mirror.
You fall for sham understanding several times a day. The open question is where it has consequences – and who bears them, if not you.
The full essay on this topic:
