Reply #15: When stupid people don't know they're stupid.

[zeos3]

Charles Darwin wrote; " Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".


Check out this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x505293


The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.<1> The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their 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: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect


Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people 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.


Here is their paper on the topic.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~dunning/publications/pdf/unskilledandunaware.pdf



Here is a follow up on the original work.

"One of the painful things about our time is that those
who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination
and understanding are filled with doubt and
indecision"
Bertrand Russell (1951)

Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent)
self-insight among the incompetent
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~ehrlinger/Self_&_Social_Judgment/Ehrlinger_et_al_2008.pdf