You are comfortably and naively living in a Matrix created by your own mind.
Are you ready to take the blue pill Steemit Neo, and discover what your brain is doing behind your back?
Something about those talent shows used to keep me up at night….Got talent, X-Factor and so on, they all had that. .. And it was bothering me…
but it’s better to show you so you can see what I mean…
So, part of the dilemma keeping me up at night was, to put it in simple terms: “How can people be so stupid?..”
As I’ve grown and matured I rephrased it into scientific, psychological terms “ How can people NOT realize they are so stupid?”
What stupidity insulation does the brain have that it is almost impossible for the owner to pierce through the armor and take a glance at his own real nature? And when the question was asked right, the answer did appear…
It is called the Dunning–Kruger effect, or what a mean person would call the “He’s too stupid to know he’s stupid” Effect. It is a cognitive bias when people mistakenly asses their abilities (artistic, professional, physical and so on) as being greater than they are.
Nothing special so far? Am I just stating the obvious? But WHY do they do that, and how prevalent is this?
The sad thing is that it has nothing to do with stupidity in and of itself. But it has all to do with the Philosopher’s Stone of the Brain, something called Self Awareness. It Turns out , our selves are a complicated thing. : Its the Real You that wakes up in the morning and goes about his business, the complex individual with all the skills, values, ideas, and flaws and the Perception of You , the one you consider yourself to be based on really random evidence that your brain chooses to focus on.
And here is where Miscalibrations can occur, to such an extent like the one you’ve seen on the video. Miscalibration is when the Perception of you becomes more of a story your brain tells itself and less of objective data from the outside that is not always readily available.
And here it’s when it gets tricky…both the very stupid and the very smart have this type of Miscalibration, just in different ways:
The miscalibration of someone incompetent in whatever area (singing, driving, business, dating) is an error about the self: that is, since they are so incompetent, they have no idea what excellence in that area really looks like and cannot rate themselves accurately. It’s like asking a 16 year old what was the biggest heartbreak they’ve had in their life…No matter how real it seems to them at the time, they still have no idea about The real extent of the Heartbreak Scale.
The miscalibration of the very competent is even more interesting. They have standards of comparison and know the extent of their skills. What they miscalibrate is the external perception of others. Persons of high ability are so used to their level of competence that they erroneously presume that the tasks that are so easy for them are more or less easy also for other people. In layman, mean terms “They’ve become too smart to realize how stupid others can be”
And that’s why Got talent and Xfactor caused me sleepless nights... It’s not just the immensity of stupidity itself that Einstein scientifically established has no end. It ’s that there is much more at play here, a much more serious impact that this Dunning Kruger effect shows about our world.
And again, I wouldn’t have noticed it, if someone else hadn’t already expressed this issue before me:
