Vince
Super Moderator
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson robbed two banks in Pittsburgh. They believed they wouldn't be caught because they had researched how to render themselves invisible to bank security cameras. They learned that lemon juice could be used to write an invisible message on paper that could only be made visible by heating up the paper. Could lemon juice make them invisible to bank cameras? They conducted an experiment: they rubbed lemon juice on their faces and took a Polaroid picture -- their faces did not show up on the Polaroid!
They rubbed lemon juice on their faces, wore no masks, and robbed the two banks at gunpoint. The Pittsburgh Police showed the security camera images on local TV, and they were soon apprehended. They were nonplussed and insisted the police had no evidence. It is unknown why the Polaroid failed to show their faces - perhaps defective film or perhaps they pointed the camera in the wrong direction.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
David Dunning read about the case. He hypothesized that if Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, he may have been too stupid to know that he was too stupid. Dunning and his grad student, Justin Kruger, wrote a paper titled "Unskilled and Unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Dunning and Kruger found that people who first start to learn about any subject have an inflated perception of how much they know. Paradoxically, when people learn a lot about a subject, they think they know less about it than they actually do know. As people start to learn about a subject, their confidence in their knowledge is never higher. If they learn more, they quickly learn how little they know about it. If they stick with it and learn even more, they slowly gain confidence in their knowledge. But they will never have as much confidence as they had initially - they have humility because they have learned how much they don't know, and perhaps can never know.
A 2022 study by Light et al. published in Science found that across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, individuals (n=3,249) who have the highest degree of opposition, have the lowest degree of objective knowledge and the highest degree of subjective knowledge (they feel strongly that they know more than the experts but fail on tests of established facts). They examined attitudes about anthropogenic climate change, genetically modified (GM) food safety, risk vs benefits of vaccination, importance of nuclear power, the lack of efficacy of homeopathic medicine, human evolution, the validity of the Big Bang Theory of cosmology, and Covid-19.
There are many other reasons: Socially-derived knowledge, Conspiracy Theories, Believing the Worst, difficulty understanding randomness and statistics, Inductive logic, and failure to understand "levels of evidence" and GRADE. Dr. Google and AI only serve to get us to the the peak of confidence in defective knowledge faster. The only solution is reliance on science and experts.
This is all explained at this link: The danger of doing your own research (or using AI)
They rubbed lemon juice on their faces, wore no masks, and robbed the two banks at gunpoint. The Pittsburgh Police showed the security camera images on local TV, and they were soon apprehended. They were nonplussed and insisted the police had no evidence. It is unknown why the Polaroid failed to show their faces - perhaps defective film or perhaps they pointed the camera in the wrong direction.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
David Dunning read about the case. He hypothesized that if Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, he may have been too stupid to know that he was too stupid. Dunning and his grad student, Justin Kruger, wrote a paper titled "Unskilled and Unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Dunning and Kruger found that people who first start to learn about any subject have an inflated perception of how much they know. Paradoxically, when people learn a lot about a subject, they think they know less about it than they actually do know. As people start to learn about a subject, their confidence in their knowledge is never higher. If they learn more, they quickly learn how little they know about it. If they stick with it and learn even more, they slowly gain confidence in their knowledge. But they will never have as much confidence as they had initially - they have humility because they have learned how much they don't know, and perhaps can never know.
A 2022 study by Light et al. published in Science found that across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, individuals (n=3,249) who have the highest degree of opposition, have the lowest degree of objective knowledge and the highest degree of subjective knowledge (they feel strongly that they know more than the experts but fail on tests of established facts). They examined attitudes about anthropogenic climate change, genetically modified (GM) food safety, risk vs benefits of vaccination, importance of nuclear power, the lack of efficacy of homeopathic medicine, human evolution, the validity of the Big Bang Theory of cosmology, and Covid-19.
There are many other reasons: Socially-derived knowledge, Conspiracy Theories, Believing the Worst, difficulty understanding randomness and statistics, Inductive logic, and failure to understand "levels of evidence" and GRADE. Dr. Google and AI only serve to get us to the the peak of confidence in defective knowledge faster. The only solution is reliance on science and experts.
This is all explained at this link: The danger of doing your own research (or using AI)
