The ignorant
they are ignorant
of your ignorance.
Attributed quote
a Peter Allan Baskerville,
historian, elected Fellow
from the Royal Society of Canada in 2008
and professor emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada
On January 6, 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson robbed two banks in Pittsburgh, in the United States of America. The pair covered their faces with lemon juice and, within a short period of time, robbed a Mellon Bank branch and Fidelity Savings Bank. Convinced that lemon juice could act as a kind of invisible ink, they believed they would be invisible to security cameras. As expected, they were quickly identified and arrested, much to their surprise.
Four years later, in 1999, inspired by this episode, psychology professor David Dunning, born in 1960 and at Cornell University in New York at the time, together with doctoral student Justin Kruger, described the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect. This effect explains a cognitive bias according to which some people tend to overvalue their skills in a certain area.
This is a systematic error in reasoning, particularly in evaluation and analysis, in which the lack of knowledge prevents the individual from recognizing their own limitations, leading to inappropriate interventions or erroneous judgments. For Dunning and Kruger, we are facing a form of unconscious incompetence: the person does not know that they do not know, and the illusion of knowledge protects them from the perception of their own ignorance.
This phenomenon has always existed. Remember the old popular proverb “Who tells you, shoemaker, to play the fiddle?”, used to criticize those who give opinions or intervene in matters that they are unaware of or for which they have no competence. Dunning and Kruger, however, gave a cognitive and scientific framework to this reality and gave it a more formal name in 1999.
In recent years, the Dunning-Kruger effect has been widely referred to, especially in the context of disinformation, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, a period in which the actions of the anti-vaccine movement became particularly visible. There has been the spontaneous emergence of self-proclaimed experts in multiple areas, from vaccines and vaccine safety to regulatory procedures or pharmacovigilance.
It is easy to assume a position of apparent authority, often marked by presumption and ignorance of one’s own limitations, when one chooses what works and does not recognize the value of duly qualified experts, for example, from the European Union.
Protect yourself from these spontaneous generation experts and don’t go for fake songs. When faced with serious issues, know who to turn to and never forget the importance of separating the wheat from the chaff.
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