Hello!
Seiiti Arata.
I am ignorant.
So are you.
Stay calm, I’m saying this with all my respect and in a scientific way.
It’s been proven that you, me and everyone else, all of humankind, we all suffer from
the Dunning-Kruger Effect and ignore our own ignorance.
Therefore, we need to make a conscious effort to try to understand where our blind spots
are and, with curiosity and humbleness, try to get the knowledge that brings us to wisdom.
The biggest trap of being ignorant is that it comes with high levels of confidence.
This helps us understand why people around us believe in fake news like conspiracy theories
and miracle cures.
You might have found out that a friend of yours, someone you thought was of good judgement…
suddenly sends you some ridiculous article that says, for example, that consuming pepper
will help you gain immunity against a virus, even though this may have absolutely no support
from the most prestigious universities.
Talking about that…
Please share in the comments which was the latest or craziest fake news you’ve received.
Now, please notice my tone of respect in this conversation when I say I’m ignorant…
and so are you.
Someone who ignores something is ignorant.
And I’m pretty sure there are many things in this planet and universe that I still don’t
know, that I’m not aware of, that I ignore.
So, admitting my own ignorance is an act of humbleness and wisdom.
However, there’s a lack of humility when people think they are superior, more intelligent
than others… and, ironically and tragically, the people who think they are better, are
the ones who also believe in many wrong concepts.
Think for example in those people who think the Earth is flat, that vaccines were created
to exterminate humanity or that there’s a secret group of Illuminati that rules the
world following their hidden interests.
Besides those conspiracy theories, the Dunning-Kruger Effect affects us all when we need to evaluate
our own level of expertise in areas that we don’t know too well and where we aren’t
able to make an objective evaluation.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the illusion of superiority.
People think they’re superior to others because of pure ignorance.
The phenomenon that makes people with limited knowledge about something believe that they
know more than the experts in that area was studied in 1999 by two psychologists called
David Dunning and Justin Kruger [https://arata.se/source-n8av].
Dunning and Kruger began studying the subject after a very curious case in which a robber
decided to steal two banks in the middle of the day in the United States.
The robber wasn’t wearing a mask and he even smiled at the bank’s security cameras.
This made the work from the police very easy.
When the robber was caught, he was confused.
He thought that if he rubbed lemon juice over his face, he would become invisible and the
cameras wouldn’t see him.
It turns out he read that the chemical properties of a lemon are used to make invisible ink
[https://arata.se/toostupid].
The police department tested him for insanity but he passed the mental health tests.
By studying cases like this one, psychologists noticed that people who think they’re superior
to others always end up making wrong choices and achieving poor results because of their
ignorance.
And they’re not able to admit their own mistakes.
This behavior was called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
People with lower capacity aren’t able to recognise their own incompetence, their own
ignorance.
And this low level of self-knowledge makes them overestimate their abilities.
A decrease in your confidence is a sign of progress.
The more you study, the more you find out there’s a lot to learn.
When you know absolutely nothing about something, you could blindly trust everything you read.
Unlike what we’re used to thinking, an ignorant mind is not an empty mind.
An ignorant mind is actually one full of preconceived ideas, experiences, hunches or intuition,
and concepts from other areas of knowledge.
This mix of previous ideas (preconceptions or prejudice) makes an ignorant mind imagine
stories and theories that give the impression of being trustworthy.
For example, let’s say you’ve never studied about how a virus spreads or how it can be
contained.
Then, you receive a message from a friend saying that if you eat a pinch of pepper everyday,
you’ll be immune to the virus.
Since you know nothing about virology, you believe that message because of the wrong
use of preconceived ideas.
You think “Maybe it can kill the virus because pepper is hot”.
This is a type of rationalization similar to “if lemon can make invisible ink, I can
become invisible for the security cameras”.
And because of those wrong conclusions, you swallow pepper everyday, believing in something
useless and, even worse, not doing other things that could be much more useful for your well-being.
In this example, your ignorance made you extremely confident about being immune to the virus.
This ignorance not only puts your health at risk, but also everyone who lives with you.
The opposite also happens.
The more you study about something, the less confidence you have on absolute truths.
A professional specialised in virology knows that there are countless factors that can
influence the way a virus spreads.
This makes professionals be wary of the solutions proposed, so they are always testing new hypotheses,
making science move forward.
Most people think they’re better than the average.
Even if it’s statistically impossible.
The confidence ignorant people have about being better than the rest, goes against the
laws of mathematics.
For example, 88% of the people who were surveyed claimed they consider themselves better than
most people.
In another survey, 94% of the teachers claimed to be better than their colleagues.
More than 30% of the programmers stated that they’re among the 5% of the best professionals
in their company.
Despite it being mathematically impossible, most people consider themselves above average.
[fonte: https://arata.se/source-9bep]
When we don’t know much about a subject, we simply think that the little we know represents
a lot of what we need to know about that subject.
Since we also ignore the size of the field of expertise, we think our knowledge represents
a big part, when it actually represents near to nothing.
We have all suffered from the Dunning-Kruger Effect in some way.
Try to remember a time when you’ve claimed something pretty convincingly, just to find
out that you were absolutely wrong.
The good thing is that there’s a way of getting rid of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
There’s a way of not having to feel ashamed of being the ignorant person who thinks they’re
better than everyone else.
The solution is education.
Learning how to learn is the best way of getting rid of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Without ignorance, you’ll never feel ashamed again.
To get rid of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, you need to work hard and educate yourself as
much as possible.
You have to learn how to learn, that is, you need a clear method to assimilate good quality
knowledge in the most efficient way possible.
Of course you don’t have to become an expert in every area of expertise.
You need to develop a critical and analytical mind so you can be wary and analyze without
ignorance the facts around you.
By using the best techniques of investigation to learn more about any subject, you can use
your critical and analytical mind to review any important information.
This is the kind of knowledge that will get rid of your ignorance.
This is how you will never, ever, feel ashamed again, for being an ignorant person who thinks
they’re better than everyone else.
So, every time you feel too confident about something, beware.
You could be a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect again.
In order to stop being an ignorant person in many subjects, you need to know how to
learn efficiently.
Learning how to learn is not difficult, if you use the right methodology.
In the How To Learn Faster course, I objectively teach you the latest scientifically based
techniques to study more, and better.
You can discover the course now, by accessing a special lesson about meta-learning by visiting
https://arata.se/howtolearn