There is a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It is a cognitive bias where “people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.” This stems from the inability to recognize one’s own ineptitude. Without self-awareness, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence. It is named after social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger (Cornell).
It is all over the damn place.
I’m sure you see it all the time, too. A common response to seeing this tends to be, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” People all the time are dead sure about things they have no business being dead sure about.
Now that that’s out of the way and we’re all on the same page (because we see fools everywhere), let’s step back for a minute and reflect.
We are these fools sometimes. It’s true, and if you say you don’t do this, I’m calling you a damn liar. Why?
Because imagine the sheer audacity it would take to believe you’re right all the time. Seriously. You’re not. Your dad’s not. Your sister’s not. Your professor’s not. Your reverend’s not. Your favorite politician’s not. I’m not. No one is. Think back on your life. You have been wrong before. The odds that you are right about every damn thing you believe right now are pretty damn low. In fact, they’re non-existent. You have been wrong before and you will be wrong again and you are wrong about shit right now.
So why is it so hard to step away from being adamant about things always? Why do we think we know?
How did it come to this?
Let’s back up for a second and consider how we get our information. Firstly, we often delegate our thinking. That’s natural. There is not enough time in the world to ponder every damn thing and hash out what’s what. We also don’t have all the information, I don’t care what anybody says. So what do we do? We get information from a source we trust. That is the first element. Trust. We assume that other people have done all the work already, then we pick people who think like us, we listen to them on the issues, and we say, “makes sense to me.” And we roll with that. Then we aggregate information from other sources we trust and we often assume we’re good to go because the people we get info from are all basically saying the same shit.
Concurrently, everyone who doesn’t end up saying the same shit, once we’ve decided whose word to take on an issue, must either be stupid or they don’t have the right information, or they’re not to be trusted. So what do we do? We dismiss them. (This is the Quickest Path to Dismissal in action.)
The other thing is that we learn things and that’s as far as we take it. We know that we have pieces of information, because we read about it, or we saw a video, or we learned it somehow. We are sure we know this thing because we are sure we looked into it. But we probably don’t have the whole picture. Being sure about a knowing a thing is not the same as being sure about gathering a piece of information. We often confuse the two.
Don’t identify with the answer or approach.
What solidifies our thinking is that we have a habit of identifying with the answer to the issue. This is why we get defensive whenever anyone challenges these ideas. Because they are attacking us. Subconsciously, our egos are being attacked.
The hallmark of a fool is a mind that never changes. — Athenatos
But what are the odds, really, that all the people you happen to get your information from are correct? It just so happens that you picked the right people, every time? Why would you believe anyone all of the time, knowing that all humans are wrong at least some of the time? This is like going all in on every single poker hand. Why would you think that this solution you are dead set on is the best one?
Because you are a free thinker.
That’s what we all think, but how free of a thinker are you if you’re just getting your information from an echo chamber (people who already agree with you)? Remember, we delegate a lot of our thinking, which makes us the opposite of free thinkers.
Why am I coming at you like a damn spider monkey right now?
Because I want you to succeed and improve and be impervious to outside influence. I want you to be autonomous and capable. Most of all, I want you to be strong enough to admit that you a) were wrong, and b) might be wrong about [insert anygoddamnthing here]. It’s not hard. Why do you care if you’re wrong? Why do you need to be attached to any particular solution? Why does it matter? Think about these things, really think about them.
When you attach yourself to a particular solution, you oftentimes end up defending bullshit, just as those you see as fools on the other side of the issue often end up defending their own bullshit.
Think about one last thing: every idea can be improved upon. Every solution has an improvement. This is the case. Therefore, every idea out there is not the best one. Many ideas are wrong in one way or another, and that’s okay. Remember that everyone in history has been wrong, even the best minds. If these geniuses can be wrong about shit, then why be averse to it?
Because you don’t want to be embarrassed, ridiculed, shamed. Blah blah blah. Be strong enough to not care what people think. Because guess what? They could be wrong.
The three wisest words one can utter are I don’t know and I was wrong.
-Janden
Leave me a comment if you’ve struggled with this.
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