Are you familiar with Dunning-Kruger Effect?

[Ichingcarpenter]

It might explain a lot about Faux News, Republicans, Tea Baggers etc. Its sort of like John Cleese posted lately on youtube about Truly Stupid People Will Never Know They Are Stupid

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.


How to Detect a Self-Proclaimed Expert

According to Wikipedia, for a given skill, self-proclaimed experts will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill
fail to recognize genuine skill in others
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.


Those who genuinely know their stuff are considerably modest, when compared to those who have a fraction of their experience and knowledge.

Maybe the easiest way to detect a real expert is via that very word: “expert.” Is it inaccurate for me to argue that true experts rarely refer to themselves as such, if ever? There’s that idea again: “the more you know; the more you realize how little you know.”

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/do-you-suffer-from-the-dunning-kruger-effect/


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect



I came up with this way back iin college when I was taking logic and philosophy classes

The only thing I know 'absolutely' is nothing because nothing is an absolute ...

though even now quantum physics has proven that nothing is filled with something.... Now I know even less

[alphafemale]

1. thanks. off to work now. I'll read this later. nt

[handmade34]

2. k

[tclambert]

3. So . . . are you claiming to be an expert on the Dunning-Kruger effect?

[DeadEyeDyck]

5. you best me to it! n/t

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. "I suffer fools gladly''

seeing ye yourselves are wise."

[Javaman]

4. I think this is natures way of thining the herd...

how many times on Youtube have we heard the famous phrase, "now watch this!" Only for the moron committing whatever heinous act, to face plant.

Besides if there weren't stupid repukes, who whould we make fun of? LOL

[Myrina]

7. Haha, I used to work in an IT department full of them!

I got so crazy from it that I left the company, and now only 1 person I work with (out of about 40) thinks he's alot brighter than he actually is. Of course he's got a law degree, an he's our boss.

[bhikkhu]

8. My favorite examples of that:

awhile back when I was taking care of my 3 year old nephew and some of his older cousins, he was boasting about how he was the fastest runner of anyone - then sprinted across the livingroom and right into a piece of furniture, which left a big bump on his forehead I had to explain to my sister...

Then a few days later my boss and some rural RW types were hanging around the shop and talking politics, I think the gripe that week was the auto industry bailout, which they knew all about from talk-radio. Anyway, my boss (who has many good qualities, but has never been accused of being very smart) assured everyone that he could absolutely run the country better than that Obama character.

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. Sarah Palin is the standard model for this effect

I can't think of a better example than her.

[RufusTFirefly]

10. I think Joe the Plumber is an expert plumber

Except his name isn't Joe, and he doesn't have a plumber's license.

That's the Republicans in a nutshell

[saras]

11. Never heard of it. There's no such thing. What makes YOU think you know so much?

(see sig for implicit sarcasm tag)

[BB1]

12. Also worth noting:

"Studies on the Dunning–Kruger effect tend to focus on American test subjects. Similar studies on European subjects show marked muting of the effect;[citation needed] studies on some East Asian subjects suggest that something like the opposite of the Dunning–Kruger effect operates on self-assessment and motivation to improve:

Regardless of how pervasive the phenomenon is, it is clear from Dunning's and others' work that many Americans, at least sometimes and under some conditions, have a tendency to inflate their worth. It is interesting, therefore, to see the phenomenon's mirror opposite in another culture. In research comparing North American and East Asian self-assessments, Heine of the University of British Columbia finds that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, with an aim toward improving the self and getting along with others."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[Ichingcarpenter]

13. Actually as a personal observation

After living in Europe for a few years again, this is more prevalent in American culture, which has to do with the so called ...can do attitude .. in some ways. The can do thing we have as Americans are real.
But for me that goes back to my forefathers that came here

However, I would put even that observation as a misrepresentation of the effect.

American phenomena? Yes, I would agree that it is a cultural and not endemic to the rest of the world. Most western cultures have an insecurity compared to the US after WW2.

Yes, I think it is a cultural phoneme, which is perpetuated my American exceptionalism.


We, as a nation, have many things to proud of

but ignorance and arrogance
because of power is not one of them.


The arrogance of the ugly american is written with our wars and so called world police actions, which creates this myth within the populace's understanding of their reality.
Which may expain American exceptionalism.

They are not experts on history
or reality.

It is real and needs to be recognized for what it is.

[dmallind]

14. Possibly due to educational methods?

When a majority of Americans have been educated in the "no rankings no F's everyone's good at everything just in different ways" approach that values keeping your self-esteem over making yourself estimable, it's hardly a surprise that those whose intellects warranted a bottom-quartile ranking now believe themselves to be above average. They've simply never been told otherwise.

[bhikkhu]

21. Possibly...in 3 year olds, its human nature

so I suppose it should be possible to grow out of it, or be educated out of it.

US culture has never been big on maturity; a friend of mine observed once that the goal of most adults is to live like teenagers whose parents are out of town for the weekend. In a way, all the working and other responsible stuff we have to do is given little importance beyond filling the spaces between the good times.

[spooky3]

17. But the wiki misstated the findings

The primary finding was that INEPT people tend to inflate their assessments. The competent people in the US samples did NOT.

[McCamy Taylor]

19. Thanks. Confirms what I was about to post.

"I'm dumber than you, therefore I'm smarter" is a characteristic of cultures that value rugged individualism over group consensus.

In the fronteir America, rugged individual ruled. It still rules in some communities such as mountains, where people must be self reliant and easily adaptable.

Remember, nothing exists without a reason. Even genes which appear to be deadly, like sickle cell, persist because they also offer an advantage. Sickle trait (which is more common than the disease) gives some resistance to malaria.

Human personality traits are no different.

[Joseph8th]

15. :) Quantum physics hasn't proven nothing is filled with something, tho...

Because physicists don't prove theories -- they demonstrate them empirically. Mathematicians write proofs. Physicists write reports, using math proved by mathematicians. Sorry -- math guy, here.

That said, not sure what the last sentence even means. Sorry... one of my pet peeves is everyone wants to use QM as the final arbiter of all things metaphysical. It's called quantum MECHANICS for a reason: entirely mechanical. Entirely deterministic -- as long as you don't expect to know everything about the system.

It's the "uncertainty principle" that has given QM this metaphysical aura, but the measurement problem is also mechanical. The reason we can have things like quantum entanglement is b/c of this little-understood mechanical wave-particle property. But it's no big mystery. This thought experiment should elucidate matters:

Say you want to measure the position and momentum of a basketball in flight, tossed randomly, and that the smallest object in the universe is a softball. You can't use a radar gun or laser to measure the b-ball, because photons are smaller than softballs. So you devise an experiment: you'll very precisely throw the softball at the b-ball, and measure the way the impact changes the softball's motion.

The problem is, when the softball hits the b-ball, the b-ball changes its motion, as well. It's one thing to measure the position and momentum of a car with, i.e., radar. It's another thing entirely to measure the position and momentum of a car with a slightly smaller car.

And that, in a nutshell, is the measurement problem.

[hunter]

18. Your explanation is incorrect.

Particles interfere with themselves. Our inability to measure both the "position and momentum" of a particle is a fundamental property of the particle itself. Matter and energy are different aspects of the same thing, and this thing simply cannot be mapped precisely into our four familiar dimensions of x,y,z and time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_slit_experiment

...For example, when a laboratory apparatus was developed that could reliably fire one electron at a time through the double slit,[10] the emergence of an interference pattern suggested that each electron was interfering with itself, and therefore in some sense the electron had to be going through both slits at once — an idea that contradicts our everyday experience of discrete objects. This phenomenon has also been shown to occur with atoms and even some molecules, including buckyballs. So experiments with electrons add confirmatory evidence to the view of Dirac that electrons, protons, neutrons, and even larger entities that are ordinarily called particles nevertheless have their own wave nature and even their own specific frequencies.



Results of a double-slit-experiment performed by Dr. Tonomura showing the build-up of an interference pattern of single electrons. Numbers of electrons are 11 (a), 200 (b), 6000 (c), 40000 (d), 140000 (e).

Our innate sense of objects and energy and dimensions is an approximation, an approximation that fails even within the scope of modest experiments.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. Definitely true in foreign language teaching

There's a point at which the typical student feels that he or she knows everything, perhaps because they have been able to handle a few limited situations.

Many quit at that point.

But those who stay on come to realize how little they actually know.

Someone once did a survey of English-speakers who lived in Japan and spoke at least some Japanese. The people who had been there for two years or less were confident that they had no communication problems. But the longer people had been there, the more uncertain they were about their own competence.

[the_chinuk]

20. How about this effect …

is there any name for the effect where a dumb person thinks you'll reach the same conclusions as him because he subconciously assumes that he's of average intellect?

Seriously. This is what I run into every day.