The Confident Idiot

The trouble with Ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise that we reach a point where we can no longer tell the difference.

In the more solemn confines of a hall conducting a certain  social experiment, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the fictitious concepts they were asked about such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid and cholarine along with a few genuine ones like centripetal force and quarks. In fact, the better versed respondents considered themselves in a general topic, the more familiarity they claimed with the meaningless terms associated with it in the survey.

 In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

It’s odd to see people who claim political expertise to assert their knowledge of both Shri. Hamid Ansari (the vice president of India) and Smt. Subhalaxmi Iyengar (a pleasant-sounding string of syllables). But it’s not that surprising.

 For over 2 decades there have studies of Metacognition, the process by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning�"and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical but never dull.

In my point of view, ‘The meaning of education is merely to be able to distinguish between what you know and what you don’t.’ However, this simple ideal is rather difficult 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 just an armchair theory. A whole battery of experimentation have had confirmed it in the past but its only recently that I have realized for myself that people who don’t know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating or financial knowledge.

 

As a college student, many contemporaries and I have handed in exams that earn Ds and Fs but we tend to think our efforts will be worthy of far higher grades. Low-performing chess players and elderly people applying for a renewed driver’s license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot.

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to us. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all! 

The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. 

As such, wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction-towards the truth.

So the next time you do not know something, it’s not a big deal to say a simple, “I don’t know!” At least it saves you the embarrassment of looking dumb in front of those who actually do! 

 

 

Reviews

[FzAngler]

Very well said. In my younger years I was very insecure so to compensate I would be and expert on things I had little knowledge of. " A little knowledge is dangerous". Often resulted in embarrassment. I have no problem saying " I don't know" these days.

[Upasana Priyadarshiny]

thank you for taking the time to read and comment... and yes, I've done the same so i think i can share this embarrassment of yours. :)