Big Pickles

Charles Darwin said it first: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." But Dunning and Kruger designed some experiments around the idea and quantified the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that incompetent people tend to overestimate their level of skill, and that you actually have to have some degree of skill before you can begin to perceive your lack of it.

It might well be called the Dilbert effect, as much as Scott Adams talks about it. (Not to be confused with the Dilbert Principle, which states that companies intentionally promote incompetent people into management to limit the amount of damage they're capable of.) The one problem with the world, he claims, is that most of us are dumb about most things. Because of that, not only do we fail to recognize our own ignorance--and therefore inflate the importance of our own opinions--but we also fail to recognize the genuine skill and knowledge of those who aren't dumb about those particular things, and therefore we wind up discounting their opinions because they are usually different from our own.

Labels: dilbert, wikipedia