Dunning-Kruger Effect

[Stella]

I'd never even heard of this before I was labelled with it here. But since then having read up on it it seems to fit with the personality of Donald Trump perfectly.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they are. Low-ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their capabilities.

The basic idea behind the Dunning-Kruger effect is this: if you don't know something, you also don't have the ability to recognize that you don't know it.

The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize—that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overvie ... ct-4160740

Can someone make the case for it not describing Trump or if it does describe him, why is his contribution so acceptable to voters choosing the leader of a country.... if someone who dabbles on internet forums have to be cancelled for it.

Discuss.

[Doom]

I get that you are a person of the left and therefore despise Donald Trump, but beware of following the idea of just adopting the most negative language you possibly can of Trump just because you can.

Yes, Trump is boastful, but people who have something called "a sense of humor" (in other words, no one on the left) can recognize that his boastfulness is mostly him joking around, he likes to say those kinds of things because they are funny and because they trigger the left into paroxysms of foaming at the mouth rage which is always hilarious to watch. The kids call the habit of saying outrageous things solely to piss other people off and then laughing as they get outraged is called "trolling" and Trump is an expert troll. And you are one of those who falls for his trolling.

The person that describes is Joe Biden who is possibly the most narcissistic and sociopathic human being who has ever lived in the White House, Joe Biden.

It is Biden, who in a conference call with Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives last week, described himself as "the greatest foreign policy mind in the world" and then dared them to name anyone in the world who is a greater expert than himself. He then followed up by claiming to "have put NATO together" (no, that was Harry Truman in 1949, and the NATO alliance was not at any risk of falling apart when he took office), and to be the greatest national security expert in American history.

Is he a great foreign policy expert?M. Not really, in the words of Robert Gates (Obama's Secretary of Defense), "Joe Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy question in his career." To give one glaring example of his wrongness, Biden was the one "no" vote on the covert mission to kill Osama Bin Laden in May 2011.

Also, to listen to Biden's boastfulness, which is a quality he has had his entire career, and probably his entire life, he has the highest IQ of anyone else in government (as a point of fact, for 50 years he was widely mocked in Washington by both Democrats and Republicans for his stupidity, if there was one thing everyone in Washington agreed on it is that Biden was a complete moron).

Also, to listen to Biden's boasting, he is the holiest man, the most devout Catholic, oh Earth, and the greatest Catholic theologian since Augustine, and if you don't think so then, as he said in an infamous quote in 2004 "I will shove my Rosary beads right up your ass."


Biden is the classic example of an insecure guy who feels inferior trying to puff himself up through arrogant boasting.

[peregrinator]

The American system doesn't exactly reward politicians who are humble. Honestly that's probably true of large-scale democracy in general.

[Kage_ar]

The person that describes is Joe Biden who is possibly the most narcissistic and sociopathic human being who has ever lived in the White House, Joe Biden.

I get that you are a person of the right and therefore despise Joe Biden, but beware of following the idea of just adopting the most negative language you possibly can of Biden just because you can.

People on both sides do the "my guy might be bad, but whaddabout the other guy who is literally satan?"

The original question... is not going to generate productive dialogue when one says "You like your guy because you are too stupid to comprehend how loathsome he actually is"

I know brilliant people who support Mr. Trump, not a few of them are regular posters here (including my buddy, Doom). For those I've talked to, reasons run a gamut from "he is not the other guy and the other guy is satan" to "most pro-life President ever" to "he is a brilliant man".

The political debate today is driven by personality and who is shouting the things that resonate with you. That is why folks are super tribal about their visual media - they are a Fox or OAN guy, they are an MSNBC guy. They listen to X podcaster or Y podcaster. What goes in the eyes and ears conditions the mind so that a person values opinions that agree with those things and finds contradicting voices to be immediately dismissed.

My son (usually pretty Libertarian) is a supporter of Donald Trump, as are several members of my family. Tossing around jabs or demonizing each other is not good for our relationships, so, we don't. We can have a ton of great conversations when we get together and never once bring up partisan politics.

Bottom line, Dunning-Kruger is not helpful to bring forward real discussion in politics, religion, even what brand of coffee to choose.

[anawim]

I know a lot of NY'ers just like Trump (some in my family tree). So, I "get" him. Would I invite him over for a dinner party? Never. Do I want to send him back to Washington to continue to work on the border, bring back the pipeline, get tough with foreign leaders, etc.? Absolutely.

[Tired]

Heck, I'd invite him over for dinner. Would probably be interesting.

[BobCatholic]

I think that political partisans suffer from this.

[Tired]

suffer from what?

[BobCatholic]

suffer from what?

the Dunning-Kruger Effect

[gherkin]

As far as I can tell, virtually everybody exemplifies Dunning Kruger to one extent or another. Stella's OP has a misleading description of the effect, linking it to low intelligence. That's not the reality. It doesn't have to do with intelligence, but with expertise. Just read the intro to the Wikipedia description of it to see that this is a common misunderstanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E ... ger_effect

Ironically, the fact that it's a common misunderstanding is likely an exemplification of Dunning Kruger: someone hears the term mentioned, looks it up in some popular online place, encounters a brief description and then thinks she understands it. In other words, that person overestimates her ability to understand something, believing that a google search and a quick, uncritical read of a popularizing article on the topic will generate insight. That is a kind of example of Dunning Kruger at work. It's not about whether a person is "smart" or not. In fact, some of the most egregious examples of Dunning Kruger that I've encountered in my life have come from accomplished physicists trying to talk about philosophical matters. They think they grasp the philosophical issues at hand (and their great intellectual achievements in their own areas will only exacerbate that sense of intellectual superiority which undermines self-doubt), but in fact they are talking nonsense. Dunning Kruger is not about smarts, it's about domain-specific competence.

BTW, it's all in Plato.

[Kage_ar]

BTW, it's all in Plato.

I would buy that T-shirt in a heartbeat!

[gherkin]

Stoled it from CS Lewis.