The Island of Knowledge is a metaphor that envisions a growing island with a rugged coastline marking the boundary between the known and unknown. The more we know, the more we realise the extent of our sea of ignorance, which makes us want to ask and know even more. In human psychology, there are over 100 identified human cognitive biases. They are well-studied but constitute only half of the problem of errors in judgement—the other half being noise. Most of us are terrible at weighing risks presented as abstract probabilities and we discount heavily the well-being of future generations and our future selves, as well as the well-being of distant strangers. We are highly susceptible to conspiracy thinking and display an impressive capacity to deceive ourselves before doing the hard work of deceiving others, and do so in ways that are both psychologically strange and, in a modern environment, ethically indefensible. These human predispositions likely endowed our ancestors with certain advantages, but they also suggest that our species is not biologically prepared for seeking a precise understanding of the world as it actually is.