Ramin Saadat

Is Understanding Pleasurable? The Existing Evidence, the Conditional Pleasure Hypothesis and Its Implications for Ignorance Studies

Is understanding inherently pleasurable? This article reviews the existing evidence and decoupling four distinct epistemic states: knowing, learning, understanding, and the "aha" experience. Currently, the strongest evidence for epistemic pleasure concerns the aha moment and curi...

The Illusion of Sufficiency: Is Critical Thinking Skill Enough?

This is the third and final article in the trilogy ‘The Illusion of Sufficiency’. The two earlier articles tested two content areas of critical thinking, logical fallacies and cognitive biases. They showed that knowing the names of these patterns, without applying them, does not...

Should We, Like Artificial Intelligence, Sometimes Rewrite Our Thinking From Scratch? What Separates Machine From Human

This article begins with a simple observation: midway through a long conversation, an artificial intelligence sometimes suggests starting the chat afresh. Rather than taking the model's own explanation for this suggestion at face value, the article turns to an external measure of...

The Ominous Triangle of Ignorance: Proposing a Three-Axis Analytical Framework in Ignorance Studies

Three categories of false belief, namely superstitious or paranormal belief, pseudoscience, and vacuous pseudo-philosophical nonsense, have not previously been treated as a single, named analytical unit in the ignorance studies literature. This paper attempts to fill that gap by...

How Much Precision Is Really Enough? A Look at the Precision of Writing in an Age of Unlimited Judgement

Large language models have turned the supply of critique from something scarce and costly into something abundant, instant and almost free. As a result, the list of objections these models raise against any text is structurally endless and never reaches saturation. This article a...

Emergent Ignorance in the Digital Age: Linking Qualitative Ignorance Studies and Network Epistemology

This paper explores the emergence of a new form of structural ignorance in the digital environment, one that arises from network connections rather than a lack of information or intentional deception. It bridges two distinct intellectual traditions that have historically not enga...

Emergent Ignorance in the Digital Age: Linking Qualitative Ignorance Studies and Network Epistemology

This paper explores the emergence of a new form of structural ignorance in the digital environment, one that arises from network connections rather than a lack of information or intentional deception. It bridges two distinct intellectual traditions that have historically not enga...

The Classification of Ignorance and Its Challenges: A Comparative Review of Pre-modern and Contemporary Traditions

Ignorance, unlike many subjects that humanity has taken seriously, has not yet found a shared language for classifying its own types. This paper reviews the efforts made so far to distinguish types of ignorance: from pre-modern distinctions in the Greek, Roman, Jewish, Islamic, C...

The Classification of Ignorance and Its Challenges: A Comparative Review of Pre-modern and Contemporary Traditions

Ignorance, unlike many subjects that humanity has taken seriously, has not yet found a shared language for classifying its own types. This paper reviews the efforts made so far to distinguish types of ignorance: from pre-modern distinctions in the Greek, Roman, Jewish, Islamic, C...

Has Public Ignorance Really Increased in Our Time? A Critical Examination of the Claim, Broken Down into Measurable Cases

This preprint presents a critical empirical and methodological evaluation of the widely repeated claim that public ignorance has grown in the age of the information explosion. Drawing on longitudinal survey data across nine epistemic domains (from scientific, political, and finan...