I found this article illuminating and relevant to political thought. Apologies this is not a real “diary”.
Here’s the link: psmag.com/…
“We are All Confident Idiots”
— and some quotes:
“It’s odd to see people who claim political expertise assert their knowledge of both Susan Rice (the national security adviser to President Barack Obama) and Michael Merrington (a pleasant-sounding string of syllables). But it’s not that surprising. For more than 20 years, I have researched people’s understanding of their own expertise—formally known as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning—and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull.”
”For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.”
“Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. And over the years, I’ve become convinced of one key, overarching fact about the ignorant mind. One should not think of it as uninformed. Rather, one should think of it as misinformed.”
”Because of the way we are built, and because of the way we learn from our environment, we are all engines of misbelief. And the better we understand how our wonderful yet kludge-ridden, Rube Goldberg engine works, the better we—as individuals and as a society—can harness it to navigate toward a more objective understanding of the truth.”
— it’s a very informtive read! I strongly recommend it.
A
I append my tweet:
“As I once explained to my good friend Dunning Kruger, we need to be confident fools so as to go forth and discover we are confident fools. He said I didn't know what I was talking about.”
Of course Dunning and Kruger are two different researchers, and I’ve never met either. One last important thing, it’s written by David Dunning, the Dunning part of dunning-Kruger.
