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The Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Paradox of Our Own Ignorance
The Four Types Of Information
- Known Knowns: Things we know, like how to ride a bicycle.
- Known Unknowns: Stuff we don’t understand, like quantum physics.
- Unknown Knowns: Things we know but never realized that we knew it. Most of it comes naturally to us, like parenting or crying.
- Unknown Unknowns: This is the information we have no clue about, and we don’t even know the fact that we don’t have a clue about this.
Most people have information in all these four types, making each brain a combination of a labyrinth and a jigsaw puzzle.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
The Blindspot Of Ignorance And Incompetence
Humans are not very good at self-evaluation and may be unaware of how ignorant they are. This psychological deficiency is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where an illu...
Developing Meta-Cognition
Meta-cognitive skills are developed by:
- Self-reflection by journaling, along with a review of your progress and personal changes.
- Using second-level thinking by asking yourself about potential blind spots or missing information.
- Using mental models for testing your assumptions and separating the signal from the noise.
- Taking notes using an app or even pen and paper, trying to visualize your knowledge using diagrams and doodles.
- Being aware of the various cognitive biases that can cloud our thinking, and learning more about them.
Meta-cognition is the essential requirement to be able to gauge one’s competence or the lack of it.
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Key Ideas
The Dunning-Kruger effect
It's a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Inexperience masquerades as expertise. And we tend to see it in other people,...
Intellectual humility
It means being actively curious about your blind spots. It’s not about lacking confidence, or self-esteem. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others.
Why we need more intellectual humility
- Our culture promotes and rewards overconfidence and arrogance;
- At the same time, when we are wrong — out of ignorance or error — and realize it, our culture doesn’t make it easy to admit it. Humbling moments too easily can turn into moments of humiliation.
We all think our beliefs are correct
That is why we believe them. In reality, almost everything we believe will eventually be at least partially wrong.
Since some of our beliefs are probably partially incorre...
Thinking “I know exactly what to do”
The reasoning behind this belief is that if you believe you know what you're doing, you'll have more confidence, and you'll do it better.
This may sound nice at first glance, but confidence can also make us justify our own position. We'll be less open to constructive feedback and likely ignore a lot of good ideas and better options. To adapt to change , you have to be open to be wrong in the first place.
“It’s not fair”
The issue with this statement is with our definition of "fair." We do not know how much one person suffers and whether it's more or less than we do. We also don't know whether something we find terrible today isn't life's greatest gift ten years from now.
There are things in life we can control and things we can't. Put your time and energy towards those things you can control.