1/ Hey, so what the fuck's wrong with the world, anyway? (A thread...)
2/ While researching and writing an article on news media at the beginning of the year, I was reminded of a famous Bertrand Russell quote:
“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are so confident and the intelligent are so full of doubt.”
“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are so confident and the intelligent are so full of doubt.”
3/ Russell was describing what psychologists would decades later label The Dunning-Kruger Effect. The Dunning-Kruger Effect shows that the less knowledgeable people are, the more they tend to overestimate their knowledge and abilities.
4/ Similarly, the more knowledgeable somebody is, the more they tend to doubt themselves.
5/ The Dunning-Kruger Effect occurs for the simple reason that smart and experienced people are aware of what they do not know.
6/ Whereas dumb and inexperienced people have no idea what they don’t know. They think they know it all! And so they act accordingly. Aaaand, it’s the rest of us who pay the price
7/ One of the issues with making information so easy to access online is that it likely causes people to over-estimate their knowledge, thus inspiring widespread Dunning-Kruger-type behavior.
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