The American Dunning-Kruger Epidemic (Or Why Ignorant People Are So Sure They’re Right)

This article was originally published by Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper

It’s time to address an epidemic in the United States. It’s one that could be deadly, particularly to liberty.

It’s an epidemic of Dunning-Kruger. It’s why ignorant people are so certain that they’re right.

What’s that, you ask?

The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which individuals, who are unskilled at a particular task, believe themselves to possess above-average ability in performing the task. On the other hand, as individuals become more skilled in a particular task, they may mistakenly believe that they possess below-average ability in performing those tasks because they may assume that all others possess equal or greater ability. In other words, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.” (source)

And haven’t we all seen that lately? Let’s look at a recent example right here in the good ole USA.

Those who haven’t lived like the rest of us are the ones shouting the loudest.

Let’s start with the current gun control debate.

We have high school kids who think they are experts on policy, firearms, and the Constitution, smugly telling us how clueless they believe we are.

We have movie stars who make millions from movies where they shoot people and who are protected by armed security guards, telling us that we law-abiding citizens who have guns are vicariously responsible for every school shooting that has ever happened.

We have wealthy city dwellers who live in buildings with doormen telling the rest of us that we’re nuts for wanting to protect ourselves.

And all of these people who want to loudly tell the rest of us how to live our lives have one thing in common: they are completely out of touch with the real world.

When you live in your guarded castles, you don’t have to worry about defending yourself from a rapist who might break in through your bedroom window. When you’re a kid, you can’t fathom the vast responsibility one feels as a parent to protect one’s children from home invaders or kidnappers. When you haven’t yet gone out there and lived your life with jobs and crime and financial instability, you have no idea what it’s really like for the average American.

And yet, these out-of-touch people are the ones screaming the loudest that only they know what is right for America.

And that’s where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play.

Back in 1999, social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University performed tests on some subjects and discovered that in many cases, the lower the performance of a subject, the higher their confidence was that they had done well. They published their findings in a paper entitled, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

In an article by David Dunning called “We Are All Confident Idiots,” he wrote of his studies:

In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.

What’s curious is that, 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.

This isn’t just an armchair theory. A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed 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. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver’s license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot. (source)

Hmmm….that sounds familiar.

And the way Dunning applies this to politics vividly demonstrates why we have the polarization we’re currently experiencing in the US.

Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. And any information that we glean from the world is amended, distorted, diminished, or forgotten in order to make sure that these sacrosanct beliefs remain whole and unharmed…

…Political and ideological beliefs, too, often cross over into the realm of the sacrosanct. The anthropological theory of cultural cognition suggests that people everywhere tend to sort ideologically into cultural worldviews diverging along a couple of axes: They are either individualist (favoring autonomy, freedom, and self-reliance) or communitarian (giving more weight to benefits and costs borne by the entire community); and they are either hierarchist (favoring the distribution of social duties and resources along a fixed ranking of status) or egalitarian (dismissing the very idea of ranking people according to status). According to the theory of cultural cognition, humans process information in a way that not only reflects these organizing principles, but also reinforces them. These ideological anchor points can have a profound and wide-ranging impact on what people believe, and even on what they “know” to be true.

It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that facts, logic, and knowledge can be bent to accord with a person’s subjective worldview; after all, we accuse our political opponents of this kind of “motivated reasoning” all the time. But the extent of this bending can be remarkable. In ongoing work with the political scientist Peter Enns, my lab has found that a person’s politics can warp other sets of logical or factual beliefs so much that they come into direct contradiction with one another. (source)

And most importantly:

Sacrosanct ideological commitments can also drive us to develop quick, intense opinions on topics we know virtually nothing about. (source)

This isn’t just about gun control, though.

This article isn’t just about the hot-button topic of gun control. It’s about how we’re living our everyday lives.

Here’s an example: People either love President Trump so much they are unwilling to see any wrongdoing or they despise him to the point that they are unwilling to recognize any right-doing. Most people’s analyses of the actions of the President are completely warped by their sacrosanct ideologies of whether he is “good” or “bad.” They don’t weigh the merits of the actions – instead, they judge them from a place of deeply committed cognitive bias.

The same thing is true for many topics:

• Illegal immigration


• Freedom of speech


• Political ideologies


• Economic theories


• Gay rights


• Abortion


• The right to bear arms


• Taxes


• The bathroom drama at Target

All of us – myself included – can look at the list above and immediately say whether we are for or against these things, and what our specific belief is – but do we honestly know the details of these topics? Are our opinions sourced from cognitive bias or fact?

I have biases. You have them. We all do. However, the ability to recognize your own cognitive bias is the gold standard of intelligence.

This isn’t something that is going to change.

It’s completely normal for us to base our opinions on our own moral beliefs. As Dunning wrote, we are, at heart, either individualist or communitarian, hierchist or egalitarian. These are core attributes that would be difficult, if not impossible, to change.

But what we CAN do is make a conscious effort to catch ourselves when we make rapid judgment calls without the facts. We can educate ourselves on both sides of an issue and make an effort to use facts instead of feelings in our arguments.

What we CANNOT do is expect everyone to play by these rules. But that’s okay because by understanding how an opposing view was developed, we can use that to fuel our own arguments. We can call out the cognitive biases. What we can’t expect is for facts to change their deeply held beliefs, no matter how ignorant those beliefs might be.

We can correct the lack of information, but we can’t really expect someone with a confident, sacrosanct opinion to change their minds. They’ll hold on to a belief even after it is proven factually incorrect because, as Dunning said, “We are all confident idiots.” Remember, facts have nothing to do with why they have their points of view.

The good news is that there are folks in the middle, who may not have a deeply held opinion on hot-button topics. These are the folks who can be reached by logic and facts. It’s nearly impossible to battle confident ignorance, but with facts, you can influence people who are undecided.

If you ask me what is going to be the end of our civilization, the rampant epidemic of Dunning-Kruger seems to be the most likely cause. Let’s not be guilty of this confident ignorance ourselves. Let’s vow to inoculate ourselves with facts instead of enabling ourselves with emotional biases.

Hat tip to Suzanne

Please feel free to share any information from this article in part or in full, giving credit to the author and including a link to The Organic Prepper and the following bio.

Daisy Luther is the author of The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide To Whole Food on a Half Price Budget.  Her website, The Organic Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca</e

WATCH: Taxpayers Held Liable After Cops Beat Elderly Deaf Man Because He Couldn’t Hear Them

An innocent elderly deaf man has been vindicated after he was beaten for seven minutes and arrested for no reason following a traffic stop. Now the taxpayers are going to be held liable.

The post WATCH: Taxpayers Held Liable After Cops Beat Elderly Deaf Man Because He Couldn’t Hear Them appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

Family Sues After DCS Took Little Boy, Allowed Him to Be Tortured for Years & Fed To Pigs

Kansas City, MO — The family of the late Adrian Jones has filed a lawsuit against the state of Kansas, the state’s Department for Children and Families and several others, for the horrifying murder of this innocent young boy.

In 2011, Adrian was taken from his mother by DCF over claims that she wasn’t able to properly supervise her child. It is a matter of court record, according to the suit, that Adrian was in perfect health when he was taken by the state. However, all that would quickly change.

As the court records show, “this wrongful death lawsuit involves the grotesque circumstances surrounding the tragically short and brutish life of A.J., a little boy who died a horrific, unimaginably gruesome death at the hands of his father and stepmother, an entirely avoidable child-homicide.”

Within just a few months of DCF taking Adrian and placing him in the care of his stepmother—who was observed caring for the child while high on drugs—and admittedly abusive father, the reports of injuries began pouring in.

The first reports were of Adrian’s sibling who suffered internal bleeding and extensive bruising all over his body. In spite of the medical provider explicitly noting that these injuries did not fit the description Adrian’s father gave of the child falling down stairs, DCF failed to act.

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A few weeks later, another hotline call would be placed to DCF in which Adrian’s father admitted Adrian “busted his head open.” Again, no action.

During the inquiry into a third hotline call, the stepmother admitted that the father abuses the children and her. Police also recorded Adrian having a black eye, and the stepmother admitted that she heard ‘choking noises’ when the father would take Adrian to the bathroom. Again, no action.

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“A.J.’s mistreatment was the repeated subject of a seemingly endless series of reports and hotline calls to social workers and social service agencies in both Missouri and Kansas,” the lawsuit states. “KsDCF conducted a forensic interview of A.J.’s siblings, who disclosed Father hits the children on the head, Father puts the children in a corner and hits the legs, stomach, and hands, Father’s hands were red after he hit the children, and Stepmother kicked A.J. with a boot, hit A.J. in the head with toys and other objects.”

In spite of the mountain of evidence showing an ongoing pattern of horrific child abuse, DCF failed to act on multiple occasions. Instead, they made the father sign a document in which he promised to not abuse his son. According to the lawsuit, this amounted to little more than a “pinky promise” with a monster.

“But instead of responding by permanently removing the child from his home, the agencies
and social workers took a strangely different approach: They meticulously investigated and carefully documented every violent kick, punch, slap, and injury inflicted upon A.J. by his sadistic father and stepmother, and generated stacks of records and reports chronicling the ceaseless, stomach-churning abuse. But their idea of intervention was limited, almost exclusively, to having A.J.’s father and stepmother sign a piece of paper agreeing to stop torturing the child – the legal equivalent of a “pinky swear.” As it turned out, that signed paper might as well have been A.J.’s death warrant,” the lawsuit states.

In 2012, the father and stepmother moved to Missouri. For nearly two more years, Missouri social workers documented similar abuse. However, one social worker, Rebecca Caldwell, named in the suit, wrote off Adrian’s bruises as ‘dirt’—in spite of the fact that Adrian reported the abuse.

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Just like their counterparts in Kansas, the Missouri Department of Social Services also took no action.

In 2014, another social worker, Amanda Donnelly, named in the suit, documented marks on Adrian’s body and noted how Adrian told her his dad would tape his arms and legs as punishment. Donnelly, like the social workers and police before her, did not act.

Months later, Adrian was sent to various mental hospitals. During this time, his father repeatedly told MDSS and social workers that he did not want Adrian back. In spite of several years of documented abuse, and the fact that the father explicitly noted that he did not want the child, the state put this little boy back in the care of these two monsters.

Sometime between 2014 and 2015, DCF received hotline calls reporting pictures of Adrian being abused were posted on his stepmother’s Facebook page, according to the lawsuit.

They were literally bragging about torturing a child on social media. Again, no action was taken. Months later, it was too late. According to the lawsuit, “naked, tortured, and starved to death, his (Adrian’s) remains were found discarded in a pig pen on a farm in Kansas.”

In spite of Adrian showing obvious signs of torture and malnutrition, not a single state actor intervened.

In case after case, we see the state remove children from caring families who may have been caught with a plant or chose to homeschool. TFTP has documented multiple cases in which children were taken from good parents only to be placed into horrifying situations and end up molested, tortured, and murdered.

While Adrian’s mother may have been unfit, the fact that multiple state agencies allowed a little boy to be tortured to death, while documenting the abuse along the way, speaks to the gross incompetence of bureaucracies who claim the authority to take children and do with them what they please.

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“Let’s just realize we need to fix the system we need to stop letting it happen to children it happens too often,” Judy Conway, Adrian’s grandmother, said. “When a child flat out says that they’re being abused then someone needs to step up and protect that child.”

Cops Sued for Ignoring Calls For Help Leading to Little Girl Being Raped to Death

ALBUQUERQUE (CN) — The grandparents of a 10-year-old girl sued Albuquerque this week, accusing it of failing to investigate the child’s mother, her boyfriend and his cousin, who are charged with first-degree murder: physically and sexually assaulting the girl until she died.

Victoria Martens, a fourth-grader, died on Aug. 26, 2016, after being raped, suffocated, stabbed and dismembered by her mother, Michelle Martens, and two friends: Martens’ boyfriend, Fabian Gonzales, and Gonzales’ cousin, Jessica Kelley, according to criminal charges against the three.

They also are accused of wrapping Victoria’s mutilated body in a towel and burning it in a bathtub at Martens’ Albuquerque apartment. Police arrived after receiving multiple 911 calls from neighbors who heard screaming.

Martens and her boyfriend approached a neighbor for help after accusing Kelley of beating them with an iron.

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All three have been charged with first-degree murder, child abuse, kidnapping, tampering with evidence and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

John Martens and Pat Martens, Victoria’s grandparents, sued the city for wrongful death on Tuesday, claiming its police department violated the New Mexico Children’s Code when they failed to help Victoria despite receiving a report about her mother’s behavior.

“The abuse suffered by Victoria was reported to the City well before the brutal maiming and sexual violence that killed her on August 24, 2016,” according to the complaint in Bernalillo County Court.

The New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department received a report on March 28, 2016 that one of Martens’ boyfriends had tried to kiss Victoria. The department referred the report to the Albuquerque Police Department, “where APD individual defendants made the decision to not investigate the complaint regarding Michelle Martens’ boyfriend,” according to the complaint.

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The grandparents say the officers were improperly trained to deal with such a situation, and “wrongly believed that a warrant and probable cause were required to investigate the complaint.”

Police Department spokesman Fred Duran told the Albuquerque Journal in January this year that investigators had met with the girl and her mother, “but did not take action because no crime had been committed.”

The grandparents disagree.

“Officer Fred Duran also attempted to cover up the fact that the city failed to comply with the law by perpetuating the falsehood that no reports were made in order to protect the privacy of the child,” the complaint states.

The grandparents say Duran had been “correctly briefed on the information concerning the CYFD [Children, Youth and Families Department] complaint of sexual violence regarding Michelle Martens’ boyfriend a month earlier.”

The Albuquerque Police Department has been under federal investigation for years for widespread use of excessive force, including officer-involved killings.

The Martens seek punitive damages for wrongful death, negligence, civil rights violations, loss of consortium, and an injunction ordering the Albuquerque Police Department to respond within 24 hours “to any CYFD referral involving a minor child.”

They are represented by Robert Gorence with Gorence and Oliveros in Albuquerque, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Martens, Gonzales and Kelley will be tried separately next year. Second Judicial District Court Judge Charles Brown set Martens’ trial date first, July 29, 2018.

Representatives for the city of Albuquerque did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

School Cop Fires Gun in School for No Reason, Hitting a Teacher in the Neck — Not Arrested

Auburn, MI — A school resource officer at Bay City Western High and Middle School in Auburn, MI, discharged his weapon in the line of duty on Friday, Nov. 11^th, at 12:30pm. But it’s not what one might think. Officer Adam Brown was reportedly in an empty room when the incident occurred. According to Michigan Live, Brown discharged his backup weapon, a .380 caliber Sig Sauer handgun, the bullet passing through a wall before striking a teacher in the neck.

Bay County Sheriff John E. Miller stated Brown’s possession of the weapon “conforms to departmental policy” and added, “he qualified with it and he was cleared by the range officer.”

Police officers must qualify at a gun range by shooting at targets with predetermined acceptable accuracy. But most police officers’ backup weapons usually never come out of their holsters, often located around the ankle. Why Brown removed his secondary weapon from his presumed ankle holster is anyone’s guess, and the police have offered few explanations. The shroud of silence has alarmed many parents, according to MI Live, who were only notified of the discharge by an automated school-delivered voicemail to their phones.

Brown is no rookie, having already logged more than 20 years with the department. There’s no question as to his competence to handle a weapon. However, the officer’s judgment is now a concern. An investigation is underway, but until concluded, Brown’s superiors are not commenting on how the incident occurred, neither are school officials. For now, they’re mum, having complied with Michigan State Police’s request not to comment.

Pauline Helmling, president of the Bay City Public Schools Board of Education, did address the officer’s discharged firearm. Helmling told reporters, “This shook all of us to the core. It was very scary. And we are so grateful that no one got hurt.” Helmling offered no details but did say, “Being that it’s still under investigation and in the hands of the Michigan State Police, we know only as much as the public knows right now.”

Jenny LaPlant, a parent, voiced her concerns. “I didn’t even know there was a police officer in this school,” she said adding, “I don’t believe it’s that bad of a school that it needs a police officer, let alone an officer with a gun. To me, they just put my kid and everybody else’s kid in harm’s way and they don’t have enough respect for us parents. They should have called a meeting, but they’re throwing it under the rug. My kid goes to that school and I do need to know what happened.”

Another parent, Kevin Cliff, addressed the school board with his concerns and stated, “They didn’t say a word.” Cliff continued, “It seems like they’re trying to cover their behinds. I think the secure mode (lockdown following the shooting) wasn’t done to make sure kids were actually safe; it was done to say they did it. That’s the only justification. It really seems they’re trying to close ranks. They’re not being forthcoming. It makes me really question if there’s more to the story.”

From what we can tell from the MI Live story, a female teacher was struck in the neck while she was instructing her class. Brown, who once was named the “Officer Of The Year,” has reportedly been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

You may have heard it said that “Guns don’t kill, people do.” Responsible gun owners are well aware that firearms simply do not discharge all by themselves. When a gun is fired, it happens because either the trigger has been pulled, or an object has struck the back of the hammer (if the gun has one), causing the firing pin to make contact with the bullet’s primer, firing the weapon. Many handguns have several safety features to prevent such unintentional discharge. So, in all likelihood, Officer Brown was handling his backup weapon, either cleaning it, or admiring its fine characteristics, and pulled the trigger. Either way, it is safe to say the firearm did not discharge while it was holstered around his ankle.

With a teacher having been struck in the neck by the officer’s bullet, many parents are questioning whether or not school resource officers are even necessary. One problem with school resource officers on campus is with what they customarily do after an incident occurs. They arrest teenagers (a great number of whom are minorities) take them to jail, and often prosecute them in the judicial system. There are innumerable instances where students have been arrested –all of which may mean the students are sometimes more likely to get an arrest record by the time they graduate high school, than they are to earn a high school diploma.

But we cannot help but look at the incident with another point of view. If a teacher accidentally discharged his/her weapon at school, striking another teacher, the teacher would subsequently be arrested. So why are police held to a lower standard? The teacher, even if he/she had a concealed carry permit, would have committed the crime of discharging a weapon in public, not to mention a ‘gun free zone,’ but when a police officer discharges his weapon in school, in the end, no arrest of the police officer will likely take place.