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We Are All Confident Idiots
An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell. He's written an article on the "psychology of human wrongness," explaining how confidence in one's answers tends to be high for people who don't know what they're talking about. He says, "What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge."
Dunning goes on: "A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don't know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it's grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver's license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot."
Dunning goes on: "A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don't know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it's grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver's license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot."
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Idiocracy is happening.
"The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, as lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras." - Wikipedia
In 1995 McArthur Wheeler actually tested this beforehand with a camera. One way or another his test proved he was invisible, at least to himself.... (lens cap maybe? bad film? somehow didn't get himself in frame when taking the picture?).. He robbed two banks in plain daylight. Later was showed the CCTV footage and still didn't understand how it captured his face..
I read about this a few months ago and just found this to be one of the funniest things. Imagine doing something so stupid a whole psychological theory was inspired.
s/©//g
How does he know he's correct is a fucking 20 page journal paper and bulky quantities of empirical data. Science has methodology to help test and validate hypotheses. It doesn't mean he's absolutely right about everything, but it is evidence the idea didn't come from nowhere.