Say What?

 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!

There’s something to that, though I’d push on two points.

First, “holds up” needs a qualifier. The core finding that low performers overestimate their ability replicates well.

What’s still disputed is why, since part of it looks like a statistical artifact rather than a purely metacognitive deficit.

So the effect is real, but its size and cause are less settled than the popular version suggests.

Second, your hypothesis fits the mechanism.

The original argument was that the skills needed to do something well are the same skills needed to judge whether you’ve done it well.

Critical thinking is a skill of exactly that kind: Evaluating evidence, noticing weak arguments, and asking what would show you’re wrong.

Someone who never developed it has few tools for catching their own errors, so their confidence goes unchecked.

Studies of college students, such as Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift, found that a sizable share showed little measurable gain in critical thinking over four years, which supports your point that many people never develop it.

The complication is that critical thinking doesn’t transfer as cleanly as we’d like.

Research suggests people can be rigorous in their own field and credulous outside it, and having the skill isn’t the same as using it when a claim flatters their beliefs.

So the divide is less “those who have it” and “those who don’t” than a spectrum, with most people applying it unevenly.

Do you see it as something that can be taught, or does it depend on temperament?

I am starting to realize... after 78 years of living in this 'vale of tears...' that just about everything in life is on a spectrum rather than black and white!

Absolutely, Allan. And it ties back to what we were discussing: Noticing that most things sit on a spectrum is itself a mark of well-developed critical thinking. Black-and-white sorting is the default mode of an untrained mind, because it’s quick and it feels certain.

One caution, though, since you value directness. Spectrum thinking has its own failure mode, which is concluding that because a gradient exists, distinctions don’t matter.

Dusk shades into night without any sharp line, yet day and night are still different.

Some questions really do have answers, and a claim can be simply wrong. The skill is knowing which questions are graded and which are not, and that sorting is harder than either “everything is black and white” or “everything is gray.”

It’s also a conclusion that tends to arrive with age and experience, which may be part of why it’s hard to hand to someone younger. They usually have to learn it by running into the exceptions themselves.

Has it changed how you think about the people on Quora, or just about things more broadly?

Just broadly, a lot of the idiots on Quora are trolls that do a good job... since I'm sitting here discussing it!!!!! 😉

Ha, fair point, Allan. They got a free hour of your morning and a good chunk of your attention, which is exactly what a troll is after. The sharpest ones know that provoking a thoughtful person is a better prize than provoking another troll.

There’s a wrinkle that supports your theory, too.

From the outside, a troll and a sincere fool can look identical, and a good troll deliberately imitates the sincere fool.

So some of what you read as Dunning-Kruger in action may be performance, which would mean the commenters are cleverer than they look and the platform’s population is less foolish than it seems.

The practical upside is that if a comment might be bait, you’re under no obligation to treat it as a real argument.

Not replying is the one move a troll can’t work with!

On the bright side, this started with a bleak question about humanity and ended with a more cheerful answer: 

Some of them aren’t idiots at all, just good at pretending!

That’s an improvement!