SO YOU WANT TO BE INTELLIGENT & KNOWLEDGEABLE?: Knowing what we don’t know. 30 MAR 2017

Two teenagers, boyfriend & girlfriend, are wrestling in fun, pinching each other and the boy twists his gf’s nipple. The offended mother has the boy convicted as a sex-offender, and with that jacket the boy will spend the rest of his life an outcast…burdened with countless expensive sex offender classes and regulations…rejected for housing & jobs, forced to pay large sums to the court system and probation officers who will monitor him. But what does society know about this young man?? Only his label on his jacket that never comes off. He will forever be a pariah. MeanwhIle, powerful men, like many of our politicians, who are genuine perverted pedophiles will go scot-free of any stigma or prosecution. And like a scene from the book The Godfather, mothers will even bring their young daughters to them to be abused. Such is our society that up is down, and down is up. The system that claims to protect young girls actually systematically victimizes them and covers it up. So what does these actual examples have to do with the topic at hand?…the point is how much do we really understand, versus what we simply accept as a fact. The powerful man is idolized as a hero. The playful boy is shunned as a dangerous animal. And these kind of false impression permeate our society.

CONFIRMATION BIAS. So today we have PresidentTrump. And we have a process that is splitting our nation into two factions that hate each other. Anti-Trump liberals feed off of countless lies and distortions of the anti-Trump mainstream media. The Trump supporters are convinced Trump can do no wrong, and are downright ticked off at the deranged Libtards. But can Trump do no wrong?? Each side is feeding off of reports that confirm their own bias…and we see a polarization in this nation like never before. And the conservatives are glad that the liberals are not in the driver’s seat…but I ask, what will be the end result of this split in the nation? Is it truly good that Americans split into two camps? Is it good that both sides feed off of that information that confirms their bias & beliefs??? Such is life. (C’est la Vie). Confirmation bias is the norm for people…unfortunately, most people are not able to take a meta view of it all and realize that are not seeing the entire picture.
meta cognition) of what the limits are to their awareness. We often work off stereotypes, labels, prejudices, and Itwhat the crowd mentality is thinking. It is a truth that the more intelligent a person becomes, the more aware they are of what they don’t know!! For most of my life, I have watched people who know almost nothing of a subject, over imagine that they are experts. With the advent of the Internet, and the post-modern world which claims there is no reality–reality is what you want it to be, the problem with over estimating one’s knowledge has skyrocketed!! Now everyone thinks they are a expert, they only need to google a subject to talk about it. However, most people are quite unaware how limited the info on the Internet is. True scholarly expertise on any skill or knowledge set goes way beyond google, just as it did in the past when one relied on books. People used to mistakenly think they were an expert on a subject after reading a book on it, when all they got is the perspective of the author–often only a one-dimensional look at something which was written under the influence of confirmation bias.

RESEARCHERS HAVE CONFIRMED THE PROBLEM. The common phenomena of ignorant people over estimating what they know has been confirmed by numerous studies and has a name: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Let us cover this important phenomena…The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately.
Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will::

fail to recognize their own lack of skill
fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy
fail to accurately gauge skill in others
recognize and acknowledge their own lack of skill only after they are exposed to training for that skill

YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH SUCH PEOPLE. People who think they are an expert, but are ignorant, are the most difficult to talk to because they don’t know what they don’t know. Nor are they able to perceive that they don’t know as much as they think. Nor do they perceive what one must do to gain a proper understanding. My whole life I have witnessed people who lacked understanding do things–sometimes winning the Darwin award by “cleansing the gene pool”. While I don’t believe in evolution, there is no doubt that people who do really stupid things have self-cleansed the gene pool, hopefully sparing future generations. This makes a good case for why the elite who are sheltered from the consequences of their actions, are not a good idea for the gene pool. While they look down at the rest of us as useless eaters, these people have been shielded from the consequences of what they do, and they are parasites on the human race.

FINAL THOUGHT. If we want to develop true intelligence, we need to develop an awareness of what we don’t know. Discovering what we don’t know is probably more critical that gathering more information. Exceeding the limits of our understanding is dangerous…perhaps lethal as those who have won the Darwin award discovered by dying from stupidity.