alt Hacker NewsI think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman".
You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.
"Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?
Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.
Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.