So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
From the article:
"The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/
* with apologies to Pendleton Ward.
I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about the bad impression it makes in a meeting, if you repeatedly say: I don't know.
Aside from the cover-your-ass aspect of it, I find this tends to spark healthy debate, even if someone's ego gets bruised in the mean time.
The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard.
I've worked really hard in the past few years to say "I don't know" even when I'm supposed to project expertise. I haven't encountered any real resistance to it, though doing the opposite does inspire confidence, particularly when you're trying to sell a product or service.
If I had a penny for every time I've seen that, I'd have a pretty big pile of coins.
The "confident idiot" basically applies a Monte Carlo search over the range of possibilities, and may eventually fall onto a good-enough solution.
I suspect that's the explanation for the D-K effect. If that's the case, then the "idiot" actually uses a pretty sophisticated overall strategy that works well in a fluid world (so not so much an idiot actually).
Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times:
1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness. 2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation. 3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today).
It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed.
The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism.
> ike a little tv in their head, power up and go.
This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me.
> So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient).
One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.
I'm very fond of a book called The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, which proffers a difficult-to-falsify but still compelling conjecture of why this should be. As you'd expect from such an ambitious title it requires an awful lot of handwaving, and accordingly it is viewed as heretodoxy in academic circles.