The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Your Ability to Copy and Paste Does Not Reflect Your Intelligence (Or Maybe It Does!)
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“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.”
—Aldous Huxley
Our society has given us the ability to instantly share 60 second TikTok videos and YouTube Shorts with a few keystrokes and taps on a screen. This ADHD technological culture floods us with irrelevant information that serves as a distractive medication from true progress and genuine unity. When we not only overwhelm the system with viral content but lack the patience or discipline to understand the entire picture of any given issue, it’s no wonder that we are in the most divisive time within American politics, culture, and within our own communities.
Media content creators are just sophists who have a self-inflated ego. They can copy and paste a URL and call it “following the science.” Even the wit of meme creators grows dull when their only target audience are those who share their same dogmatic world view.
Echo chamber anyone?
This ability to copy and paste not only reflects one’s lack of intelligence and integrity when handling the truth, but it’s lowering our overall societal intelligence. We can no longer think on a critical level. Call me old fashion, but there is no patience or tolerance even for anything that takes more than five minutes to consume, digest, and regurgitate.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explained
In the simplest terms, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a correlation between confidence and competence and leads to a cognitive bias where people believe they are smarter than they really are. This in turn causes said individuals to overestimate their ability to perform in a given field outside their expertise and is especially noticeable in the early stages of knowledge.
Named after researchers, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect is explained through the fact that the metacognitive ability of someone to recognize their own deficiencies in competence requires that they at least have a minimum level of knowledge in which they are grossly incompetent in handling, and when they do not, this lack of self-awareness gives credence to the famous phrase of being on “the peak of Mount Stupid.”
“[Referring to the moon] Yeah. And the big fish protects them. I touched it once. I don’t know, it felt like a fish.”
Think of your stereotypical American teen.
They’ve experienced a little bit of the grown-up world and therefore think they know how to be responsible and understand what it takes to progress in society. Life hasn’t fully kicked their teeth in, and since they are experts in pop culture, in their minds this translates to be adept in navigating the intricacies of life. This is obviously a generalization, but the asinine arrogance of youth it true, nonetheless.
The scary part is that climbing “Mount Stupid” isn’t just done by those within their adolescence.
The Fallacy of Appealing to Authority
During the controversy of the 2020 election I had a radiologist explain to me how this election was “the most secure election in history.” (It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways: he didn’t vote for the mean Orange Man). This “expert” then cited a governmental joint statement, not realizing that if he would’ve dug a layer deeper, he would have found that those making the statement had an invested interest in saying that the election was secure due to their voting machines being the ones called into question.
Now, let me tell you how I really feel.
Just because someone is a damn doctor does not mean they know shit about voting systems or politics for that matter. In that same light, just because someone is a radiologist or married to a radiologist does not mean either of them are competent with mRNA vaccines or medicine! If you can’t tell, yes, this same “doctor” and spouse also propagated the experimental vaccines citing an x-ray doctorate degree as the basis for their knowledge on the matter.
Maybe I just have a problem with authority.
Or maybe people see authoritative titles and give too much weight to them in all facets of life. “You don’t even have to think about it, bro!” Argumentum ad verecundiam is a fallacy in thought and argument for a reason because when you build your foundation on the opinion of a figure of authority as evidence to support your argument, like all opinions, they can be wrong. It is risky to say the least when objective decisions are made on questionable opinions. In the instance of applying the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the moment an authoritative figure (like a radiologists) moves outside his or her field of expertise, you might as well be asking Joe or Jane Schmo on the street.
A grain of salt should always be taken with what experts say about things they have no expertise in.
Cerebral Plagiarism
Let’s shift gears for a second and return to the copy and paste culture social media has promoted and made billions from. The best way I can describe this insta-share cancer we have going on is that it is nothing more than mental masturbation. Sure, it may feel good to share a quippy headline or article that “speaks to you” but in the end what good is it doing? It creates nothing. It progresses nothing and just makes a mess.
It’s cerebral plagiarism.
Not only is it boring to repeat the same ideas and remake the same films, the lack of creativity does nothing to stretch our collective or even our individual imagination, atrophying our ability to converse and debate ideas. I’m not advocating being different for the sake of being different either. What I am saying is that the information age is creating a famine of critical thinking. Quick information and quantity content is pseudo intelligence that marketers feed off through their ability to Google and implement PAA (people also ask) research abilities that is not just speeding up our rate and ability to climb Mount Stupid, but is incentivizing us to just camp out on the peak. These activists and manipulators of information have the uncanny ability to implement buzz words which are nothing more than subjective generalizations seeded in emotion.
“I am the science!”
“So, if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you are attacking science... Science and the truth are being attacked.”
While yes, it is true that we all represent something. Our image and demeanor do not solely rest on us and us alone, whether we like it or not. That’s the sole idea family of names. However, there seems to be a cognitive dissonance with people like Anthony Fauci**. First of all, the hubris to equate oneself as the sole representative of absolute truth is an attempt to squander informed dissent, and is a rather feeble attempt to avoid addressing legitimate criticisms.
Let’s layer this a little bit more.
Doesn’t the scientific method start with questioning? Doesn’t that in turn cause the formulation of a testable hypothesis? Doesn’t all this require experimentation and objective analysis of results no matter the contradiction to propagated narratives? Yes—yes it does. So why the hell would Fauci address any sort of criticism against him by stating that doing so is a direct threat against “science”?
I argue that it is two factors that come into play here.
First, he realizes the pile of shit he has been stepping in these past years. Not only did he botch the handling of the AIDS epidemic in 1980’s, but he’s been the face of big pharma’s rollout of the experimental Covid19 vaccine which is showing to be ineffective, and serious questions are being ignored about adverse reactions***.
The second factor brings us back to the original premise of this article—the Dunning-Kruger Effect. He is grossly incompetent and is simply trying to cover his own ass. Because of his status as a “scientist and doctor” he not only has inflated his own sense of expertise on the matter at hand, but so many have religiously and blindly followed the “expertise” he claims to have, mindlessly copying and pasting popular talking points, all stemming from his marketing interviews.
* Link here: https://youtu.be/dl3mjhzwEfU
** Now, although Anthony Fauci has officially “resigned”, taxpayers are still being asked to fund his record-breaking retirement, exceeding $350,000 per year—a retirement built on a foundation of having built nothing but an overinflated sense of self-importance.
*** Even more information here: https://youtu.be/6XkRq4PaHqo
The Idea of the Century
It’s a novel idea but think for yourself. As the racist philosopher himself said:
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.”
Both left and right ideologies are not immune to this dogmatic behavior that promotes the climbing of Mount Stupid. There is wisdom and a level of sophistication to Joe Rogan’s social media approach: post and bounce. Now, that is arguably just a way of adding the noise, but when you dwell on the minutia of countless of online opinions, you fall victim to the Huxleyan dystopia that overwhelms your senses with carnal nonsense.
