I’m extremely, extremely left and I have to disagree. There are a ton of vapid dumb leftists, you see them mindlessly sharing or reposting Tumblr posts and Upworthy nonsense.
I do think a more accurate diagnosis is that, on average, conservatives tend to favor more direct, simple solutions and explanations for problems whereas leftists tend to consider things more as the result of very subtle interlocking systems with very complicated solutions. I (naturally) think the leftist approach is more right, but I think this difference can explain why conservatives appear more ignorant – to a leftist’s eyes it looks like the conservatives aren’t even bothering to pay attention to the “real causes”.
As for basic facts, I don’t think either has more of a claim to be better, on average, at things like “who is the speaker” or other “state of the country” policy questions. I’d wager at least far leftists are maybe a little more ignorant of that stuff just because they’re radical enough that “who’s the speaker” isn’t exactly a pressing concern when your goal is more “destroy neoliberal capitalism” than “get a Democrat elected”, but as a tradeoff leftists tend to be far more engaged with hardcore political theory and philosophy than conservatives (though admittedly sometimes to their own detriment due to petty ideological squabbles and gatekeeping). For “centrist” Democrats I don’t expect the difference to be that notable.
I think you need to look in the mirror. Is it you that is being too judgemental? Are you taking the view that it is, “My way or the highway”? Different people have different perspectives and everyone needs to appreciate that. Sometimes there is more than one right answer. Sometimes there is no good answer.
It’s coincidental that you make this post on the D-K effect, Wesley, as I randomly noticed your post in GQ yesterday as a stellar example of it.
Do you grasp how ignorant those last two sentences are? I don’t mean the fact that they are completely wrong, but the fact that only someone with v low ability would attempt to comment on the origin of life [one of the deepest questions in science] in this manner.
The D-K effect in a nutshell, on your behalf, and science is a far more clear-cut and absolute area than people’s political beliefs.
You can have price fixing as long as you have rationing and avoid most of that backfire.
But yes, there are as many crazy liberals idiots as there are crazy conservative idiots. You find more Liberal idiots than conservative idiots on this board because leans heavily to the left. Like waaay to the left.
So these people are fine in every aspect of life except for one of THE major topics you’re not supposed to talk about in polite company, and there, they are complete morons. What a coincidence. Interesting. I wonder how many of them think the same way about you?
Nope, because a lot of time being misinformed and ignorant is a proxy for being an authoritarian. And in modern western society authoritarians tend to lean republican. Trump did even better among authoritarians than other republican candidates.
Its like race. There are people on the left who get really really upset if you mention the fact that per capita, black people commit more crimes in various areas like murder. But its still true, even if it doesn’t fit the socially acceptable narrative. Its the same with this discussion topic. Yeah we are supposed to pretend that both sides do it, but we are also supposed to pretend blacks don’t commit more violent crimes, just like we are supposed to pretend that poor people don’t abuse their kids more. But none of thats true, even if we are supposed to pretend it is.
Overall, this issue is worse on the right from what I’ve seen, I would assume due to their more advanced media echo chambers combined with their penchant for authoritarianism.
I stand by my OP. I haven’t seen this behavior on the left in the same degree. On the left, the fringe groups are some angry college students and a minority of liberals. On the right the fringe groups are half the republican party.
If you read my post carefully, you’ll see that I was posing the question to Buck Godot. I know I quoted you in it, but that was all in framing my question to him.
Anyways, since you felt like elaborating, I guess I’ll ask a followup question to you:
“On the right the fringe groups are half the republican party.”
Are you trying to claim a statistical fact here or just relating your personal, anecdotal experience? If it’s the former, what’s your source?
How does me repeating a respected hypothesis makes me an idiot?
Life forming near geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean is considered a probable situation for lifes origins. One of the potential first forms of life was crystals. No we don’t know, but it is a likely scenario.
I work closely with a gal who is a Trump voter. We had a new boss get hired on, and one day we three were discussing his recent work experience. He mentioned working for a specific Caterpillar plant, but mentioned that the plant was moving everything to Mexico. This Trump supporting gal, said: “Trump’s not gonna let that happen though, right” And she was met with the increduous looks only the sane can provide.
I believe she and her false idea of what Trump can do is typical. And if she gets a chance, she’ll vote for him again.
Well, it does seem that the truly far out wacko ideas such as those outlined in my first post do seem to be more prevalent on the right than on the left. The left doesn’t have anything close to rival the birther conspiracy much less the ping pong pizza myth. Also I doubt that a Democratic candidate could play as fast and loose with the Truth as Trump does and get away with it.
I think most Americans on both sides fail to appreciate how difficult running the country actually is as indicated by the popularity of such films as Dave where an average guy with just a bit of common sense can solve everything. But again IMHO the right seems to be more likely to value home spun wisdom/common sense over actual experience, see the popularity of flat taxes and running the government like a business as well as that dismissal of education and so called experts.
Trump is our first DK president, who really thought that he could just sit down and follow his gut and everything would come up roses, only to discover that Healthcare was more complicated than he previously thought.
I think you are all missing the big picture. Political parties are an emergent phenomenon.
People generally don’t join political parties by being logically convinced into them. People interact with other people and learn who they like and who they don’t, and they tend to join the tribe of the people they like, or in the case of people who think their way in, by whomever influenced them most.
Once in your political tribe, you start responding to incentives, reading partisan material with confirmation bias in full force. You also tend to put more stock in the quality of the intellectuals on your side, and weight them more than those who disagree. This is just human nature. Spend enough time there, and you are absolutely convinced you are on the side of the angels, and therefore you start filtering what you see of the opposition through that lens. You spend an inordinate amount of time yelling at a few yahoos and trolls, and while doing so you pat each other on the back for ‘destroying’ or ‘crushing’ the enemy. This is classic twitter behavior.
This is why almost no minds are ever changed on the internet. As the saying goes, you can’t argue someone out of a position they weren’t argued into. Instead, what you are really asking them to do is leave their tribe. They have to become at least partial dissenters on their own side, and that’s just unpleasant for everyone involved. So it happens, but rarely.
Both sides DO do it. Do you want an example of stupidity on the left? How about Trayon White? This is the barely literate Democratic Councilman who is a virulent anti-semite, and who thought a picture of an inmate being hauled away by guards was actually a Jew with a couple of body guards parading in front of everyone or some stupid ass thing, and a walled ghetto was a ‘gated community’. And what do you think the average education level might be for the public who voted him into office?
Then there’s all those far-left academics in the humanities producing reams of absolute gibberish and inciting students to rise up over asinine issues like halloween costumes. Oh, and also the students who are doing it.
And anyone who describes himself as a Communist or a Venezuela-style socialist today not only forfeits any claim to being on the smart side, but should be ashamed of themselves, considering how much human misery those miserable systems have inflicted on the planet. Venezuela is becoming just the latest victim of hard-left ideology.
I have very liberal friends who constantly post the tearful meme of the day, or on alternate days the Trump outrage. I agree with them lots of the time, but when I do try to engage them on an issue, it’s shocking how little any of them actually know about the issues they are spamming my feed with. People on this board are not normal. This is probably the group two or three standard deviations off the norm when it comes to intelligence and knowledge.
Note that intelligence is not an absolute antidote to D-K syndrome. Trump is an excellent example: he is probably much smarter, by some measures, than many give him credit for, but he has excessive confidence in his abilities. And I’ve met engineers very skilled at logic problems who had deeply flawed political opinions. OTOH, I’ve had discussions with American voters who did NOT suffer from D-K syndrome per se. They proudly acknowledged that they were incapable of understanding policy details, but embraced one side, perhaps due to the “tribalism” Sam mentions. That’s not D-K; it’s just ignorance.
Closely related to D-K syndrome is a belief that “I’m ignorant so you probably are also!” Here’s a post by a right-winger who doubled-down when I gently pointed out he was misinterpreting a statistic. Surely he knew he’d never studied statistics, yet he felt a need to assume I was similarly ignorant.
I’m not sure whether D-K, or ignorance more generally, is more common on the left or on the right. I frequently see arguments here where a leftist stance is too simplistic—complaining about price hikes during shortages is one (moot) example—but I seldom attempt a rebuttal when they’re arguing on “my side”—there’s not enough keystrokes in a day. And many right-wing arguments are based on emotion rather than facts or logic: differing values are the culprit, rather than ignorance. Nonetheless, when a right-wing argument is fact-based, the facts are misread about as often as by their left-wing counterparts.
Where Dunning-Kruger syndrome abounds in spades among right-wingers at SDMB is on matters of simple economics. When a right-winger here writes “This is Econ 101,” he’s almost always wrong. (In future please write “Econ 102” if you understand that demand elasticity is not always a constant 1: most right-wing Dopers don’t know that much.) One right-wing Doper who claimed to have studied “Econ 101” didn’t think any economist supported Basic Income. No acknowledgement was forthcoming when I cited contrary quotes from Friedman, Hayek, Stiglitz, etc.
That whole rant is so egregiously wrong and so unfair to Wesley that I feel obliged to respond to it.
First of all, you don’t understand what the Dunning-Kruger effect is. It’s not the state of being misinformed about some particular random fact, which is what this example would be if it were true. The D-K effect an ironic problem of meta-cognition whereby those of low cognitive ability consistently overestimate their own cognitive skills, which has absolutely nothing to do with what you’re talking about.
Secondly, the hypothesis that life originated around hydrothermal vents is in no way “ignorant” and is one of the current hypotheses for abiogenesis, though certainly not the only one. But recent evidence is consistent with the vent hypothesis, like the discovery of vent-related fossilized microorganisms in ferruginous sedimentary rocks that may be as much as 4.3 billion years old. The origin of life remains unknown and speculative, but if “only someone with v low ability would attempt to comment on the origin of life” then a great many scientists must have terribly low abilities, including all the contributing authors to that long Wikipedia article on abiogenesis.
BTW, the phrase “on your behalf” doesn’t mean what you think it does. That is not, however, evidence of the D-K effect.
While I generally agree with much of your post, that and some of the cherry-picked examples you cited after are not evidence for the common interpretation of “both sides do it”, an expression that, to me, carries the implication of equivalence. It’s only evidence that if you look hard enough, you can find examples on both sides of ignorance, bigotry, or any other undesirable characteristic you care to name. But one gets a different picture if one digs deeper and looks for prevailing patterns.
Which party has long and consistently been associated with hostility to and contempt for science, especially in areas that have become controversial in the public’s mind like climate change and evolution, ironically only because Republican ideology itself has sowed the seeds of doubt? Which party, for the same reasons, tends to be hostile to higher education (and considers it a “liberal” stronghold)? Who caters to the religious nutters on evolution and abortion? Who tends to undervalue and cut science research funding? (Early in Obama’s first term, he doubled funding for the National Science Foundation, which was much less important for Bush than drilling for oil, denying climate change, and invading Iraq.)
The history of Republicans’ anti-science position on climate alone is nothing short of staggering. James Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, who never met a tree he didn’t want to cut down, famously said “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.” And in that spirit, he quintupled the amount of land leased to coal-mining companies and opened up large swaths of the outer continental shelf to offshore oil drillers. He was, of course, a rabid climate change denier. George W. Bush notoriously pulled the US from the Kyoto climate agreement while casting doubt on the science, and in his administration Cheney and Phil Cooney, a top official of the Council on Environmental Quality, falsified climate change reports from the National Academy of Sciences, and Cheney’s office falsified scientific findings on the costs of fuel efficiency standards. Trump appointed so many anti-science miscreants and climate change deniers that I can’t even list them all, but most notably the moronic Rick Perry to Energy and of course the rabid climate denier and grifter Scott Pruitt to the EPA. Every single climate change denier in Congress is a Republican, and there are at least a handful of outspoken ones. Republicans, each and every one of these clowns, year after year, decade after decade.
Meanwhile Trump himself has declared that climate change is a hoax that was perpetrated by China, and shamelessly withdrew the US from the Paris climate accord, the only country in the world to do so, while Republicans cheered.
And you’re going to tell us that “both sides do it”, and cite some obscure DC Councilman as proof that Democrats are just as bad. :rolleyes:
Firstly WRT the OP, my feeling is it’s not so much dunning-kruger in this case, but a belief that “experts can’t be trusted”.
I’m not saying the smart move is to just accept authority, but it really seems a prerequisite to believing in horseshit, and parking whatever critical-thinking you may apply to other areas of life and believing whatever you choose to believe.
The OP suggests CT and political stupidity are separate but that’s not the case in my experience, and many of the dumb ideas right now *are *CTs (“deep state”, climate change is a hoax, illegal voters).
Secondly on the liberal / conservative thing, yes there is a side that kind of has a monopoly on stupidity right now.
I know we don’t want to sound tribal, and get a good feeling from saying “Both sides do it!” but frankly the idea that stupidity is equally spread is helping one side repeatedly jump the shark. There’s one side that applauds the word “science” and one side that boos it (both are kind of ridiculous but I know which side I’d rather be on).
And FOX news is the most popular network “news” show right now…what is there on the left that comes near that kind of bullshit?
Much as I’d like to confidently state that conservatives are dumb and wrong and DK more than liberals, and much as I agree that it seems that way, it’s hard to really make a statement like that definitively.
That said, I think that comparing popular and prominent opinion-leaders on both sides is informative.
Take a lineup of say:
Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
Jon Stewart
Rachel Maddow
John Oliver
vs
Donald Trump
Sean Hannity
Bill O’Reilly
Rush Limbaugh
Ann Coulter
Tomi Lahren
Which team is better informed? More intelligent? More intellectually honest? Less DK?
I’d bet every dollar I have that the liberal team wins by a LOT. And that says a lot, both as a cause and as an effect.
OP asks specifically about Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but there are other types of ignorant people:
(1) people who are simply ignorant and know it
(2) liars
(3) self-deluded liars
Among the following group
Donald Trump
Sean Hannity
Bill O’Reilly
Rush Limbaugh
Ann Coulter
Tomi Lahren
Trump may be the only one who actually suffers from D-K. Most of the others are liars, not ignoramuses. When they embarked on their careers they understood that science is real and that facts are relevant but they found a lucrative career path that depended on them pretending not to believe in science. In most cases, they started with a right-wing bias and deliberately became caricatures of themselves to get rich. (In some cases, even the right-wing bias may have started as pretense — they knew that’s where the money is for Talk Jocks.)
In order to continue spouting lies day after day, Limbaugh et al train themselves, consciously or subconsciously, to believe their own lies. They became self-deluded liars rather than simply liars. Perhaps the word “liar” should no longer be applied once they believe their own lies, but in any case the syndrome they suffer from is not Dunning-Kruger.
It’s a telling list, isn’t it? One can also add media to it: in the first group we have the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, to cite some of my favorites. In the second group we could put the Washington Times, World Net Daily, Breitbart, and of course the Fox News website. As an indicator of the stellar quality of that last group, I think most of us remember when Fox News had to curtail reader comments because of the amount of hateful drivel pouring from the bigoted troglodytes, and we also have our omnibus ongoing thread, “Is Fox News really all that bad?”, which after an enormous number of evidence-bearing posts I think provides the answer: “It’s even worse than we thought”.
Of course there are some reasonable people on the Republican side, but they are few and far between and you really have to work at it to find them. Two that come to mind are David Frum and Ben Sasse, and I’m not even sure about Sasse. I might be fooled by the fact that he’s smart and congenial. And also refreshingly honest. On climate change, for instance, he refuses to join the ignoramuses who deny it or claim scientific evidence that it’s harmless, but is nevertheless adamant that doing anything about it would be far too costly. IOW, he’s still on the counterfactual bandwagon, just less punch-in-the-face-inviting level of annoying.
