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Comment by rkangel | Hacker News Reader

> I like that term 'meta ignorance'.

Yeah, it's descriptive. I think I re-purposed a term from an academic paper that referred to meta-stupidity: stupid people are too stupid to know that they're stupid.

They did an experiment where they got people taking an exam to guess what mark they were going to get. In general, the lower scoring people in the exam over-estimated their mark more than the smart people.

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Meta-stupidity actually has another term for it as well - the Dunning-Kruger effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect - people that are inexperienced in a topic don't know what they don't know (as you put it, meta-stupidity) and so think they're smarter than they actually are - people that are more knowledgable know how vast the topic is, so realize their knowledge is less compared to overall knowledge, even though they're better than average.

Part of why it's good to be cautious around self-proclaimed experts.

The dunning kreuger effect is useless. Dumb people think they are smart, smart people think they are smart. Nothing to be gleaned from that. Only at the very fringe of the intelligent side do the lines of actual intelligence and perceived intelligence cross.

Actually the tendency is, that the more you know the more aware you get of the things you don't know. So while dumb people may overestimate their aptitude the smarter people tend to underestimate themselves. The most extreme manifestation would probably be the impostor syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

What I take from Dunning-Kruger is that unskilled people have misconceptions about themselves, not being aware of what they don't know. Likewise, skilled people have misconceptions about others, assuming they know as much as they do.

Its very easy to forget all the efforts invested in learning a skill when you've been using that skill for many years. When it becomes second nature, you assume its also that way for others.

Maybe before down voting you should go look at the data from the dunning-kruger study.

I have and it's very insightful. The people in the studies that were least competent were also, relatively, the most delusional of their inadequacies. This principle explains why you get people with little coding experience applying to developer jobs and failing the simply FizzBuzz exercise.

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