Fumbling through the Jungle of Brain biases: what Stupid and Smart both have in common
You are comfortably and naively living in a Matrix created by your own mind.
Are you ready to take the blue pill Steemit Neo, and discover what your brain is doing behind your back?
Something about those talent shows used to keep me up at night….Got talent, X-Factor and so on, they all had that. .. And it was bothering me…
but it’s better to show you so you can see what I mean…
So, part of the dilemma keeping me up at night was, to put it in simple terms: “How can people be so stupid?..”
As I’ve grown and matured I rephrased it into scientific, psychological terms “ How can people NOT realize they are so stupid?”
What stupidity insulation does the brain have that it is almost impossible for the owner to pierce through the armor and take a glance at his own real nature? And when the question was asked right, the answer did appear…
It is called the Dunning–Kruger effect, or what a mean person would call the “He’s too stupid to know he’s stupid” Effect. It is a cognitive bias when people mistakenly asses their abilities (artistic, professional, physical and so on) as being greater than they are.
Nothing special so far? Am I just stating the obvious? But WHY do they do that, and how prevalent is this?
The sad thing is that it has nothing to do with stupidity in and of itself. But it has all to do with the Philosopher’s Stone of the Brain, something called Self Awareness. It Turns out , our selves are a complicated thing. : Its the Real You that wakes up in the morning and goes about his business, the complex individual with all the skills, values, ideas, and flaws and the Perception of You , the one you consider yourself to be based on really random evidence that your brain chooses to focus on.
And here is where Miscalibrations can occur, to such an extent like the one you’ve seen on the video. Miscalibration is when the Perception of you becomes more of a story your brain tells itself and less of objective data from the outside that is not always readily available.
And here it’s when it gets tricky…both the very stupid and the very smart have this type of Miscalibration, just in different ways:
The miscalibration of someone incompetent in whatever area (singing, driving, business, dating) is an error about the self: that is, since they are so incompetent, they have no idea what excellence in that area really looks like and cannot rate themselves accurately. It’s like asking a 16 year old what was the biggest heartbreak they’ve had in their life…No matter how real it seems to them at the time, they still have no idea about The real extent of the Heartbreak Scale.
The miscalibration of the very competent is even more interesting. They have standards of comparison and know the extent of their skills. What they miscalibrate is the external perception of others. Persons of high ability are so used to their level of competence that they erroneously presume that the tasks that are so easy for them are more or less easy also for other people. In layman, mean terms “They’ve become too smart to realize how stupid others can be”
And that’s why Got talent and Xfactor caused me sleepless nights... It’s not just the immensity of stupidity itself that Einstein scientifically established has no end. It ’s that there is much more at play here, a much more serious impact that this Dunning Kruger effect shows about our world.
And again, I wouldn’t have noticed it, if someone else hadn’t already expressed this issue before me:
I'm familiar with Dunning-Kruger effect sheerly out of my own interest in how psychological biases play a roll on our actions in our society everyday, but this is a fantastic explanation of it for others who may not know and even might help some of the other members on here ;)
I've also been shocked fascinated and humbled by the immense range of psychological biases that float undetected in our heads. Dunning Kruger seemed so uninterestingly obvious that it kind'of signaled me that there is something i'm missing about it, there must be another blind spot in interpreting it.
This sort of misses the idea of competency not being cross compatible to different areas, or over confidence causing blind spots where you may otherwise be highly competent. Some times the best marks for scams aren't the stupid, but the ones smart enough to delude themselves into thinking they know how to take advantage of a situation, and often dig themselves further in thinking they can work their way out.
Ultimately what we all need to work on, smart or stupid, is authentically listening to feedback and self-reflection.
Yes, that is exactly the reason why i believe the core issue is not stupidity and IQ itself, but rather that miscalibration between The Real you and The Perception of you. If we cynically thought we had a stupidity problem on our hands, we actually have a much more serious and pervasive one: the self awareness one.
Actually, I guess I'm kinda cynical and think that it IS a stupidity problem. As information is acquired, it takes a lot of intelligence to properly contextualize it and turn it into knowledge. Information that concurs with our established knowledge base is relatively easy to process. Information that challenges it is much more difficult as it requires reevaluation and re-contextualization of the parts of your knowledge base are now invalid. The deeper into that knowledge base the challenge, the harder the task.
Your brain discards millions of bits of information from your senses every second due the limits of what it can actually process. It doesn't seem like a reach to me to surmise that you also filter knowledge you can't process either. How else can you explain the lack of insight and critical thinking on display by the "fake news" crowd?
In a way this highlights another reason to not become over-confident in your self perception. It's a lot easier to process critical feedback when you don't already assume you're amazing.
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STOPInteresting
I will follow you to see your future posts!