The more incompetent someone is, the less they are able to detect and recognize said incompetence.
Now, a less offensive definition of this effect is, the less we know, the more we believe we know. This definition is pretty easy to disect: The less capable we are, added to the short knowledge we have of things, the more unrealistic and overestimated our judgement about our own capabilities and knowledge will be.
Reading about this effect, I couldn't help but to think about something my dad used to tell me. His intention wasn't to talk to 12 year old me about the Dunning-Kruger effect, but to exemplify how, the more we read, understand and research, the more we realize how little we actually know about the world and of knowledge itself. He used to give me this example: *Eric, imagine a chess board, no pieces, just the board. Now Imagine you are at the very center of it. You are the king, can move wherever you want among the 8 spaces surrounding you. That's your potential knowledge. According to you, the existing universe are those 9 spaces, the one you are in, and the other 8 you can learn and investigate. But, what happens when you move accross one of them? You realize there are 3-5 new spaces you didn't know even existed, and now you come to the conclusion that there aren't 7 spaces yet to investigate, but now you have - potentially - 10 to 12 spaces full of knowledge, and so on.
Perhaps he was trying to awaken my thirst for knowledge, maybe he was attempting to humble me in a fatherly way - I used to (I currently am, but I'm working on fixing this, every day, until I die, I guess) be an arrogant, full of myself kid - or it could be just a way of explaining to me how, an argument is only fruitfull if the other person can grasp the concepts and ideas you are wielding, otherwise, you won't be able to reach a middle ground, get convinced by the other party, or get the other person to change their mind.
Sarcasm and the Dunning-Kruger effect
I was reading this article - it's in spanish, sorry you monolingual losers - a few hours ago, which is exactly why I decided to write about this topic. On that piece they don't mention sarcasm or the psychology behind this effect but, it got me thinking.
Well, in these modern times we now have the wise-smart-internet-knight that, despite their utter and blatant idiocy, act as if they owned the truth and copyrighted logic. Getting in an argument with an internet idiot - which believe me, are more common that you'd think - is pretty much the most pointless way of wasting time. You will end up angry because, despite your logic, easy to grasp concepts and dydactic way of explaining someone your mindset/viewpoint, they will never seem to quite get it; at the same time, you would have wasted your precious time trying to convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced and lastly, and probably the most irrelevant of them, your image towards the other party will be stained, because for them, you are an even bigger idiot than you were before you lost the argument to them.
Who knows, perhaps indeed you are an idiot and you are actually a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Maybe you believe you are in the wiser side of the argument and you are the logic wielder in a conversation; most likely, the other party will be the same; so who's the idiot and a victim of this effect and who, indeed, holds the knowledge and logic in that specific topic?
I'm not a genius and 99.99% of you reading this, also are not. All we can do to never be a idiot, is to be humble, listen to other people's arguments, try to understand them and most importantly, never speak as if our truth is the universal truth and there is nobody wiser than us in any given topic.