In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations.
My theory, sort of.
The same kind of logic fuels conspiracy-minded people. The one thing they all have in common is that they reject the mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority. They know something the rest of the sheep don't!
So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with each other, and when the information flow in society is increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't getting stupider, but they're getting more and more overwhelmed, which looks the same.
On conspiracy beliefs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786
That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have to do with it ?
I guarantee you you are uninformed on so many issues and you could easily be taken advantage of no matter how intelligent you were by someone who spent time preparing/specialising in deception - especially if the negative outcome is less then the cost of investigating the issue. Nobody has the time to investigate every choice so by your logic cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319...
"Further studies demonstrated that cynicism is more likely to be a worldview endorsed by individuals with lower rather than higher levels of education (Haukkala, 2002; Stavrova & Ehlebracht, 2018) and intelligent individuals’ behavior was shown to be more likely to depart from the norms of self-interest (Solon, 2014). Higher levels of education and com-petence in a broader sense might help individuals detect and avoid potential deceit in the first place, thus reducing the probability of negative social experiences, which might in turn contribute to a more positive view of human nature (Yamagishi, Kikuchi, & Kosugi, 1999). Indeed a number of studies showed general cognitive ability to be negatively related to cynical hostility (Barnes et al., 2009; Mortensen, Barefoot, & Avlund, 2012) and positively related to trust (Carl, 2014; Carl & Billari, 2014; Hooghe, Marien, & de Vroome, 2012; Oskarsson, Dawes, Johannesson, & Magnusson, 2012; Sturgis, Read, & Allum, 2010)."
So the narrative is about competence and intelligence is a factor as it correlates with competence.
> cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in
This would indeed follow, but if we allow for a small number of trusted sources can mostly be resolved.
Cynicism is not the same thing as skepticism. Cynicism encompasses an abstract and often moral judgment about motivations and machinations, permitting you to draw conclusions without evidence. Skepticism is more about coming to terms with the contingent nature of truth, and can be a difficult skill to employ, particularly when you're presented with concrete choices and have to make real decisions--as opposed to merely opining on matters.
I think "know[ing] you're not smart enough" inherently excludes you from belonging in the category of "less intelligent people".
One of the most defining characteristics of stupid people is that they think they're smart.
In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.
They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.
To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth.
Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.
And truth often is boring. It is only one. At first I've told my son only truth how it works (Feynman style). Now I engage in making fantasies (Diskworld style). I present all fantasies (theories) as equal, some can be constructed by physics laws. The game is to find which one. All sorts of interesting questions arise.
What is the difference between plane and satellite?
Can airplane flew that fast through air?
Is meteor burning? What is its speed?
> 120,000 km
That's third of a distance to the moon. Not sure how you got it
For example, every time someone worries about their health, they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and convince themselves they have a certain sickness just because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common infection or something, but when the untrained mind is overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold.
The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.
I was basically attacked at work as being xenophobic and insular for saying if we are going out we should wear a mask. so where were your experts on that one? sure f*#!ed up that one.
As I recall, at the time experts were saying "Don't recommend that everyone wear a mask, we have a shortage and need to save them for health care workers."
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"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus"
U.S. Surgeon General, February 29, 2020 [0]
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"Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself. Let's really underline that. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy."
Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the World Health Organization, March 2nd, 2020 [1]
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Have the experts always been like this, and it's simply more obvious now that the world is much more interconnected? Or has the quality of experts gone down dramatically? Both?
[0] https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...
[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...
So I Goggle it and sure enough he did say as much.
However, you did not post the full statement which means the context is lost.
With the full quote and the resulting context the statement makes perfect sense:
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke
So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation.
Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher.
https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did.
This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are").
The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison:
> So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.
This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals.
Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.
I think you’re misunderstanding what Dunning & Kruger presented, which is precisely why references to this paper need to stop. You cannot read literally into the graph as saying that the bottom quartile of people believed they were at the 57th percentile of ability, that’s not what the experiment measured.
Have you read the actual paper? The respondents were 1- all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra class credit, 2- asked to rank themselves, not to rate their abilities, 3- asked about such “skills” as the ability to get a joke. It seems pretty wild that anyone ever took this paper seriously. The conclusions that it makes in it’s wordy prose are not supported by the data they present.
Take a little more time to understand Tal’s primary argument - that this paper most likely is measuring regression to the mean. Because these kids were asked to rank themselves, and they didn’t know how good their peers were, there is good reason to expect a correllation less than 1. Because the authors were barely out of undergrad school themselves at the time, and not studying statistics per se, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the methodology isn’t perfect ... beyond the fact that it wasn’t a random sample of the population, it studied all rich kids who (self-selected) needed extra credit, it included no difficult mental skills, and that followup papers have shown a complete reversal of whatever effect is there, when applied to more difficult skills like law or engineering.
Now obviously there's a significant difference in degree of accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn't forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult stories to investigate, or have access to the same investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable explanation.