Claude, is it my imagination... or are a lot of people idiots?
Hello, Allan.
It’s not entirely your imagination, but I’d push back on the framing.
Most people are not unintelligent. What you’re noticing is usually one of a few things: people acting carelessly or hastily rather than stupidly, people who are sharp in their own domain and clueless outside it, or the sheer volume of public foolishness that online life puts in front of us.
A confident bad take travels much farther than a quiet good one, making the world look dumber than it is.
That said, there’s a real phenomenon underneath.
Plenty of people don’t think critically about what they believe, repeat claims without checking them, and treat their opinions as settled facts.
That’s frustrating, and it’s fair to be frustrated by it.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with the least knowledge in an area tend to overrate their grasp of it, describes part of this, though the research on it is more contested than popular accounts suggest.
One caution: “other people are idiots” is a conclusion that feels good and explains too much. It’s worth asking whether it’s folly you’re seeing or just different information, different priorities, or a bad day.
Did something in particular set this off this morning?
Mostly from reading comments on Quora!
Absolutely, Allan. That explains a lot.
Quora comments are close to a worst-case sample.
The platform rewards fast, confident answers over careful ones, and the people who write the most are often the ones with the least hesitation about weighing in.
Thoughtful readers tend to read and move on, so what you see is heavily skewed toward the loudest and least reflective contributors.
It’s like judging a town by the people who call in to a radio show.
There’s also a selection effect on the question side.
Many Quora questions are framed in ways that invite poor answers, and the comment sections underneath tend to attract people who want to argue rather than inform.
Reading it will give you a distorted picture of how people think in general. The same person who posts a muddled comment at midnight may reason perfectly well when they’re fixing a car, running a business, or raising a child.
That said, if the quality of discussion there is wearing on you, the practical fix is simple: stop reading the comments.
Is there a particular topic where you were hoping for a real exchange of ideas?
No, just the Dunning-Kruger effect...
Fair enough, Allan. Then it’s worth being precise about what the effect actually says, because it’s often misapplied in exactly the comment-section situation you’re describing.
The original 1999 study by Dunning and Kruger found that people who scored lowest on tests of logic, grammar, and humour tended to overestimate their performance, while top scorers underestimated theirs.
The popular version, “stupid people are confident and smart people are doubtful,” is a simplification. Later work suggests much of the pattern can be explained by statistical artifacts, including regression to the mean and a general tendency for everyone to rate themselves as above average.
Everyone is somewhat poor at self-assessment; the low performers are just furthest off!
The effect is real in a modest form, but it’s not the clean law that internet commentary treats it as.
There’s also an irony worth noting: People invoking Dunning-Kruger to dismiss others are often making a confident claim about a stranger’s competence based on a few lines of text, which is its own kind of miscalibration.
What it does explain reasonably well is why someone with little knowledge of a subject can’t recognize what they’re missing.
They lack the very skills needed to see the gaps!
That fits much of what you’d see in a comment thread.
Were you thinking of it as an explanation for what you read, or questioning whether it holds up?
No... I know it holds up... and I think the greatest effects of it are caused by the large percentage of people who never gain critical thinking skills!
