Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel_
Life has taught me that the more I know, the more I realise I don't know.
I recently read a research paper that showed (I summarise wildly because I can't find the original paper) that stupid people self report that they know (for example) 3/4 of everything that there is to know, but that educated people report that they know (for example) 1/10 of everything.
This leads to clever folks thinking they're dumb and dumb folks thinking they're clever.
Essentially, some people are too dumb to realise that they're dumb.
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I think what Daniel was talking about here, and what many in this thread are describing:
Dunning?Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"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 appreciate their mistakes.[1] 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. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence."
I think everyone who has begun to master a skill recognizes this in others practicing the skill, and (hopefully) in themselves, prior to their mastery. There have been so many times where I've reached a certain level of ability that I realized just how poorly I was rating my abilities prior to that point and just how much more I had to learn. Unfortunately, many people never escape this, and consistently are, colloquially, so stupid that they don't even know how stupid they are, yet rate themselves as amazing as a result of their stupidity.