Not a true fallacy, hence why it’s just a pit rant.
I’ve been annoyed by several debates recently where a person knows one thing about a topic, and becomes strongly wedded to the idea that that thing must be significant and germane to the debate.
Similar to Dunning-Krueger I guess, but the difference is the person doesn’t necessarily need to think of themselves as all-knowing. They just really, really want to apply this one thing they know.
There are several coronavirus examples of what I’m talking about, but to avoid bringing that here, here’s a couple less sensitive examples:
I was discussing with someone who was very annoyed that on an ultrasound image of bloodflow, blood moving towards the sensor is colored red, and away from the sensor is colored blue, don’t these people understand Doppler shift?!
When, in reality, there are lots of factors influencing what kind of color-coding to use, and it’s not obvious that the way light doppler shifts should even be one of those factors.
The notion that teaching children the “planetary” model of the atom, or Newton’s laws of motion is “wrong”. When you explain to such people that simplification and abstraction is a big part of science’s bag, and models can still be useful, and indeed accurate for many functions, even when they’ve been superceded in some sense, they won’t accept it.
The thing they know – Quantum > Relativity > Classical – must apply here.
So…I guess when we’re teaching kids the molecular structure of water, say, we need to begin with a quantum mechanical description of the three atoms. :eek:
Speaking as a Dunning-Kruger expert, I must say that the D-K phenomenon is often related to problems with meta-cognition. Meta-cognition is awareness of one’s thought processes and ability to self-monitor
Kinda sounds like some variation of anchoring bias. Maybe combined with something like confirmation bias or simply not learning any more about the subject.
In your examples, the piece of information that people incorrectly held as true could simply be the first, and only, thing they learned about the subject. From there, if they used that information like trivia every time the subject was casually brought up and no one suggested it might not be true, it would be more and more cemented into their memory.
My dad is one of those people. If something goes wrong, and you show him how to fix it, for the rest of ever, anytime something remotely similar* happens, he’ll immediately go to that same fix and be annoyed when it doesn’t work.
*By ‘even remotely similar’, I mean like if Firefox crashes and I tell him to reset the computer and everything goes back to normal. He won’t understand why resetting the computer won’t keep Word from crashing even the problem is him opening a corrupt file.
