What I’m thinking of is a scenario where a person has a wildly simplistic understanding of something, then they get really smug about it based on how obvious the correct answer should be based on their misunderstanding.
Like how some people were getting upset that the US government was funding research into frog procreation. They got all smug about the government wasting money on frog sex, but it was a study about environmental pollution and their effects on nature and the food chain. Within the confines of their perspective, it made perfect sense to be smug about how stupid it was, but they (either willfully or unintentionally) were ignorant of the complexities beneath the surface. Homer Simpson does this a lot FWIW.
I feel like its a mixture of a strawman, a red herring and an ad hominem attack all in one. But I don’t know if there is a word for it.
Don’t know a term, but it would well apply to people with a “common sense” understanding of navigating the local terrain rolling their eyes at the notion that the world is round. Including modern flat earthers.
Like how some people were getting upset that the U.S. government was funding research into frog procreation. They got all self-righteous that the government was wasting money on frog sex, but it was a study about environmental pollution and their effects on nature and the food chain…
Its a close cousin to the early 2000s (and probably earlier) saying ‘Grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man’.
Confidence is not just about bearing or extroversion, but includes self-assurance and complete certainty that they are right because they are, after all, a white male, which makes mediocrity someone else’s problem.
So perhaps we could try on ‘entitled self-assurance’ or ‘inherent certitude’. I’m entirely convinced without even having to think about it that they would look pretty hot in German.
“Overconfidence” translates to /vermessenheit/ in German, which translates back to English as roughly “the state of being presumptuous.”
It’s not as charming as the German back translation of a “porcupine” as “spiky pig,” so I propose /schwachsinnigselbstgefällig/, which could mean feeble-mindedly smug.
“Smug” alone back-translates to “compliant with oneself,” which is kind of a neat encapsulation of the concept.
IMO there is no single word in English that carries all that meaning. except maybe someday it’ll become the primary accepted meaning of the name of a current politician.
I don’t think there’s a single word for it. The
‘Dunning-Kruger effect’ has (perhaps ironically) been debunked. I’m wearily familiar with the phenomenon, though. The number of times some ignorant person has confidently, and often condescendingly, explained their very simplistic understanding of an issue to me! You’d have to see it to believe it.
