06.24.07
This explains everything
Well, well, well.
I posted a link to this Wikipedia article on the Dunning-Kruger Effect in my Breaking news blog. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this is much too important to just put up a link and hope someone will draw conclusions from it.
The Dunning-Kruger effect quantifies scientifically the old saying that “ignorance is bliss”. The less one knows about a subject, the more likely they are to rate highly their knowledge or skills pertaining to it.
Apparently, when you are ignorant of a subject, you are unaware of how much there is to know. This was relatively easy to test in an academic situation. It was reliable – as students began to master a subject, they also began to downgrade their assessment of their own mastery of it.
For instance, I often run into students who tell me they speak a foreign language. When I ask if they speak it at home, they say they learned it in school. The only way they could say that they “speak” a foreign language while being so utterly preverbal – which they are – would be if they had never been exposed to a situation where the language is being spoken.
Just as when teaching science classes, where kids come up with all kinds of bogus pseudoscience. No, sorry. The world is not 3,000 years old. I don’t care if they taught you that in christian school. It’s not good science, and it’s not good religion, either. The proper fundamentalist version is that the world is about 6,000 years old.
See? To believe that is true, you need to be ignorant of science, religion, and of history. Fortunately that is an easy thing to be.
Being ignorant of absolutely everything (know anybody like this?) is the best route to becoming a know-it-all. In fact it seems that persons like that are subconsciously aware that acquiring knowledge would render their wall of ignorance permeable. Thus, they avoid all facts, and they assert that those who oppose them are tainted by, have been “influenced” by facts.
For a person like this, truth can only be discovered by pure thought untainted by facts or data. Truth achieved through pure thought in this way is eternal. It need not adapt itself to reality. In fact, for a person with this frame of mind, it is a moral imperative to dismiss, deny, or pretend that confounding facts do not exist. Reality is obligated to adapt itself to the self-conjured “truth”.
In fact, ignorance is not only blissful, it is empowering and self-affirming. Ignorance is its own reward.
Think Bill O’Reilly, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter. Think about how this country seems to be heading directly into a category 5 storm with blind and deaf madmen at the helm. Need I go on?
