On The Dunning-Kruger Effect

 

Anyone active on social media will know how flooded society is with absurd, half-baked, ill-conceived theories about how the world works. Our culture is awash with people’s outlandish misunderstandings about faith, politics, economics, the climate - you name it. It’s not just alarming that these views and beliefs veer so far from facts and truth. What's more alarming is that the people subscribing to them do so with the utmost confidence, and not even a flicker of doubt as to whether they are wrong. 

There is a phenomenon that explains this: it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is basically people’s inability to identify their own inability in rationalising a proposition. Ironically, of course, because the effects of the Dunning-Kruger effect create blind spots that stop people seeing the error of their ways, those most in need of understanding the maladies of the Dunning-Kruger effect are the ones who are least likely to be persuaded by the redress.

What happens with the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people who know only a little about a subject are still too uninformed to realise how incompetent they are, and those who know a lot are the only ones who realise how enlightened they actually are. How this plays out is that it’s the people who most need to learn how incompetent they are that speak with the most confidence, and those who are most expert are the humblest as their prodigious knowledge informs them of how much more there is to know, and how complex the world really is relative to what thy think they understand. This graph wonderfully illustrates the problem:

People start ignorant and know that they know nothing (the bottom left) but then learn a bit about a subject and their confidence skyrockets far too prematurely. This peak is called Mount Stupid, and it is the point at which they are most likely to spout the most nonsense, and join misguided groups associated with hostile atheism, false religions, extreme left or right wing politics, and climate change alarmism, and groups of that kind. Once people get a bit more enlightened, they move down Mount Stupid towards the Valley of Despair. This is where confidence diminishes as knowledge increases – we begin to realise how little we know, and march on upwards along the Slope of Enlightenment, trying to master a subject. Those who reach the Plateau of Sustainability are the ones who can speak with the most justified confidence, as they have the most knowledge.

Alas, it’s those standing at the top of Mount Stupid who shout the loudest, and who dominate our political discourse and our media. It’s the people on Mount Stupid who tell us that belief in God belongs in the Dark Ages; it’s the people on Mount Stupid who think the gender pay gap is unfair and lobby the government to take action; it’s the people on Mount Stupid who obstruct people trying to earn a living because they are convinced there is a climate emergency – the loudest and most confident are the most ignorant.

Here's a reality check: it takes tens of thousands of hours to become an expert in something, and even thousands of hours just to know an awful lot. It takes those thousands of hours to learn that when you’re an expert you still know relatively little compared with what there is still to know. Most people haven’t spent thousands of hours on any subject; and most of the knowledge of the people shouting from Mount Stupid amounts to seeing a few articles online, a few comments below it, a meme, the odd video, Tweet, and maybe a book or two. Those on the Dunning-Kruger peak of Mount Stupid really have no idea how little they understand these subjects.

A further call for epistemic humility is in the fact that the majority of what we know and believe comes from other people – we rely on others by trusting their expertise and by trusting the discipline of their field too. If you only kept things that arrived solely on your own personal experience you would hardly know a thing. Think for a moment about the many things you are quite ‘sure’ are correct and see how much of that knowledge you have first hand experience of. Do you know any of the texts in the Magna Carta or the surveys in the Doomsday Book? Can you close your eyes and visualise the fine details on any of Blake’s Great Red Dragon paintings? Have you ever been to Easter Island? Have you ever seen anyone perform a segmental resection on a tiger or an elephant? Did you know that the album cover on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon features the dispersion of light as it travels through a triangular prism? Will you ever physically prove that light being scattered by the prism would produce different visible colours, or will you trust the experts? Will you ever measure the electrostatic force between a nuclei and electrons, or will you just trust the experts that solid objects are made up largely of empty space? I'll bet some of you know that if a DNA molecule is to successfully circularise it must be long enough to bend into the full circle with the correct number of bases which puts the ends in the correct rotation for bonding to occur. But you've probably never observed the difference between the 'axial' stiffness and 'torsional' stiffness of the molecule. 

Those are just a few random and unconnected thoughts about how complex the world is, and how, because of the totality of possible knowledge out there, every single one of us in an amateur when it comes to most things. All of those statements above pertain to true realities in the external world, and I don’t doubt that you could find evidence to demonstrate their validity. But those verified facts are the result of years of hard work from experts in their fields (and of course their great many progenitors too). Most of the people speaking the loudest on Mount Stupid would do well to climb on down, master the subjects on which they pontificate, and come back with better ideas, more humility, and much more respect for the complexity of the subjects on which they think they have informed opinions.