Aside: picking on neurosurgeons as qualifying for the Dunning-Kruger effect may seem mean, but is reality-based.
Examples include Ben Carson and Michael Egnor (creationists) and Russell Blaylock, a formerly distinguished neurosurgeon who fell headlong into a deep pit of crazy. Blaylock is an antivaxer who believes MSG is toxic to the brain, GMOs are harmful at any level of exposure, and that the Soviet Union imported drugs and sexually transmitted diseases into the U.S. to promote collectivism.
:dubious: I think the problem here might be just your interpreting such claims over-literally. I doubt that many, if any, people, even deep in the most subterranean lairs of the Internet, believe or intend to convey the assertion that a wise man LITERALLY knows NOTHING.
Instead, the phrase is meant to convey that when you’re wise, you become aware of what a vast infinity of potential knowledge is out there, so you recognize that your own knowledge is negligible by comparison. That doesn’t mean that you believe your knowledge is actually inferior to that of less wise people.
So, again, the intended meaning of the “smart people are humble” rhetoric is that smart people undervalue their smartness with respect to what they might know, or with respect to what they think other smart people know. It’s not attempting to claim that smart people don’t recognize that they are more or less at the high end of the smartness spectrum as currently manifested among people in general.
If you want to interpret it that way, okay, but I think your interpretation is idiosyncratic and not what the users of such rhetoric typically intend.
I would bring up Dr. Oz as well, but there’s more the likelihood he’s just an opportunist abusing his title for financial gain.
And while we’re at it, it involves an awareness that “knowledge” and “wisdom” are themselves distinct things.
I am not ignoring your questions. But I posted a lot about this subject yesterday and I want to stop and think about this for a day or so before I post anything more.
As indicated in the linked thread, I think it’s a psychological phenomenon in which a person gets used to actually being the smartest and most knowledgeable on most issues, and it just tends to transfer itself even to areas where it’s not justified.
And I think it works in reverse as well. Meaning that people tend to give added weight to the opinions of other people who they mostly deal with in areas where those others are more knowledgeable than themselves, even though the issue at hand is something where that other person does not have added expertise. (Bosses being one classic example. And I’m not just talking about flattering the guy - IME people genuinely tend to give added weight to their boss’s opinion on all sorts of subjects.)
A related concept is Epistemic Learned Helplessness, which is the process of learning to distrust arguments in areas in which you cannot reasonably judge the merits of the claims.
Basically, if you listen to two experts arguing about the finer point of a field you are not an expert in, the only way you have to tell who is right is to evaluate the structure of their argument. You can’t actually evaluate their claims because doing so requires more domain-specific knowledge than you possess. Epistemic Learned Helplessness is the skill of (essentially) disregarding arguments about things that you realize you don’t understand.
Smarter and more rational people take longer to develop this skill because they are able to evaluate actual merits for longer (and in more areas).
ELH is applying this realization to what other people tell you. Applying it to yourself is not the same thing exactly, but it is related.
It’s always difficult with such types to decide how much of their shtick is based on applied stupidity and the degree to which it’s affected by publicity whoring for personal advantage.*
Somewhere in the Dunning-Kruger orbit are people who believe in stupid-ass bullshit and point triumphantly to the fact that a doctor with, like, advanced degrees buys into the same crap, so it must be so! You can point out (gently, or not) that the doctor(s) in question represent a tiny minority of their professional colleagues, and that in most cases they’re not even qualified in the specialty area they’re emoting about. It falls on deaf ears.
*Oz BTW is an (ex?) cardiac surgeon.
I heard of something that I think was called “great man syndrome” or something similar, but I Googled it and can’t find any references. It’s basically where someone who has achieved greatness in a particular field believes they have expertise in ALL endeavors they attempt. Examples include Michael Jordan attempting baseball or Donald Trump attempting to not be some spoiled trust fund douche.
Maybe the song he heard before was another Aerosmith song. 
All their 90s songs kinda sound the same.
It is possible that he just suffered from an individual case of the Mandela Effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if people who pride themselves on have a better-than-average memory are more likely to suffer from the Mandela Effect than people who don’t trust their memory.
‘The Halo Effect’ maybe?
Another possibility: he was right… in a way.
Many really smart people “beg the question” in that they sort of see beyond the question. They ask: “define concept <used in question>” and then they go from there. For example, your friend may have thought that he remembered an original song very, very much liek "cryin"and that he may have thought that’s where Aerosmith got it from. And then he got so fascinated by the idea that he caught Aerosmith mid-songstealing, or maybe he was just musing about how musiciaans subconsciously influence each other, and then he spent the rest of the talk with you trying to find that “original” song while, you were trying to convince him of the blackc-or-white proposition that indeed Aerosmith had writing credits - which he might not even have argued with.
Also, smart people love argueing and they love being right.
I have had something similar. There are threads here like: “what dumb things did you find people don’t know” and one of the posts was: How long is a pregnancy? “Everybody knows” a pregnancy lasts 9 months. But it really is not that simple.
I wanted to mention the ‘Halo Effect’ too, but in response to what Fotheringay-Phipps posted about giving individuals that are clearly skilled in one domain too much credit in other domains.
That’s why folks listen to Ben Carson and (some, at least) consider him a reasonable choice to lead HUD even though as far as I can tell he has very little, if any, qualifications that would actually lend himself to that post. He’s a surgeon, so obviously he can run the government housing department, right?
I think the Halo Effect can even touch things like humor and appearance. It may explain why we trust tall people more, or like funny people even if they aren’t particularly nice.
It applies to victims of the Nobel Disease, and in turn to those who succumb to the Grand Poobah effect.
From the linked Nobel Disease article:
*"Whereas scores on intelligence measures reflect maximal performance (how well people can perform when pushed to the limit), scores on most cognitive bias measures reflect typical performance (how well people generally perform in everyday life) (Cronbach 1960). Therefore, even highly intelligent people may neglect to exercise their critical thinking capacities when they are insufficiently motivated to do so, especially when they are certain they are right. Although highly intelligent individuals may be more capable than other individuals of subjecting ideas to skeptical scrutiny, they may not always feel compelled to do so (Bensley 2006).
Preliminary evidence further suggests that intelligent people may have a somewhat larger bias blind spot than other people, meaning they are less aware of their propensity toward biases (Stanovich et al. 2013). Some authors have further argued that high levels of intelligence may exacerbate the risk of critical thinking failures; for instance, Sternberg (2004) proposed that several cognitive errors prevalent among the highly intelligent can predispose to irrationality; several may account for the weird ideas of some Nobel laureates. Unrealistic optimism occurs when people believe that because they are smart, they need not worry about intellectual errors. The sense of omniscience arises when people believe they are so intelligent that they know virtually everything. The sense of invulnerability emerges when people believe they are so smart that they are essentially immune to mistakes."*
The other aspect of the Dunning Kruger (not sure if it was in the original paper or a subsequent one) is that people not well versed in an area, aren’t able to evaluate the distinction between good and bad performance period. So someone who isn’t articulate may think that there is no difference between the quality of a speech by Trump and one by Obama. To their ear, they sound equally good. Meanwhile an expert, may be aware of very subtle imperfections in their performance, and so rate themselves more poorly than they deserve based on their lack of perfection.
Another example of this would be watching gymnastics or figure skating at the Olympics. To me all the performances are equally amazing (unless someone falls on their butt), but to the experienced commentators the difference between a good and poor performance is clear.
Which raises the question of whether - in areas like speechmaking, gymnastics, or figure skating - a difference which is only discernable to experts is a meaningful difference at all.
These are not at all comparable to the issue of opinions, where the difference between a nonsense opinion and a valid one is not lessened by the fact that the only one who can recognize it is an expert.
This is important to consider. Everybody over-rates or under-rates themselves and everyone else to a degree, and there’s no well established rating system to make comparative judgments with. Dunning-Kruger and any similar effects only apply to people well outside that normal range of miscalculation, not just someone who doesn’t realize they aren’t really a good photographer or is much better at math than they think.