When Stupid People Don't Know They're Stupid

[GoLeft TV]

Run time: 07:23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx7FdA7af8s   Posted on YouTube: September 16, 2010 By YouTube Member: golefttv Views on YouTube: 1   Posted on DU: September 16, 2010 By DU Member: GoLeft TV Views on DU: 5834

 
We’ve been discussing the dangers of Glenn Beck’s incendiary rhetoric for years on Ring of Fire, but in the last year, his actions have been taken to a whole new level. And with his recent Tea Party rally in Washington, it became clear that Beck isn’t the only problem out there. We now have tens of thousands of Beck followers in this country who believe that they are intellectually superior to the rest of us, and after seeing how truly brainwashed these people are, this is a very dangerous thing. Mike Papantonio talks about how this brainwashing took place with blogger and author Chauncey DeVega.

[Drale]

1. That is why they are stupid

because they dont relize they are stupid, it kind of goes hand in hand.

[Permanut]

36. K & R

Sheesh, what a great thread. You folks have just described most of my inlaws.

[damntexdem]

2. If they knew they were stupid, they wouldn't be so stupid.

But they'd likely still be as hypocritical and disgusting.

[Brusselscov]

3. dunning-kruger

Yes, it's The Dunning-Kruger Effect again.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[izquierdista]

6. Maybe

There was this kid who was too arrogant to use spell check.

[southmost]

9. you forgot the sarcasm tag

if not, geez... irony is dead

[sce56]

20. How about a 21 post person who should be smelling Pizza soon. Sounds like you support Herr Beck!

Tombstone Pizza anyone?

[Aristophrenia]

14. Without Doubt my favourite new word -

Absolutely brilliant and needs to enter the popular lexicon.

Dunning Kruger !!!!

[tclambert]

19. Yeah, I sure am glad I'm smart. Wait, maybe that means I'm a victim of Dunning-Kruger disease.

How would I know?

3.1415926536
The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
Gort Klaatu barrada nikto.
What is Sudbury, Ontario? (It's where Alex Trebec was born.)

Whew! Okay, had a moment of hypochondriasis there.

[BrklynLiberal]

31. lol.

[geckosfeet]

5. nice interview, good material

[texastruth]

7. stupidy rules

Just come to Sugar Land, Texas...wheeew it's tough...

[indy legend]

8. Try Indiana, or as I "lovingly" call it : GOP Hell

These dumb asses here just can't get enough republican abuse. They get screwed over and over by the same republfux time after time and they just can't wait to come back for more. These are truly the dumbest shit kickers on earth. No matter how bad it gets they would rather pull their own teeth (those that have any) than to admit they are wrong and vote democrat.It doesn't mater what turmoil their miserable life is in, or weather or not they have a job, health care, paved roads,police and fire or schools as long as abortion is stopped, gays can't get married and the politician manages to work God, Guns, America, and support the troops into every speech. They all cheer, wave their flag, and bend over. to reinforce this in Indianapolis we have four Reich wing radio stations spewing crap 24/7/365 telling them how evil liberals are and how great America was under Reagan,Bush & Bush, and that some twat like Sara Palin will save us from the commie,Muslim, Kenyon. BTW we do not have one single minute of progressive talk radio here. "Damn that liberal media"

[freebrew]

34. Indiana, you got nothing on us in the bible belt...

hell, where I'm at, it's called the bible crotch.

Lake of the Ozarks is full of nothing but these too smart for their own minds morons.
Mostly real-estate salesmen and crooks. Or, do I repeat myself???

[southmost]

11. hi neighbor!

and the stupidity is unbearable in Brazoria county closeby here in TX (hope we can at least get Bill White in the governor's mansion)

[sadbear]

23. We left Brazoria County 4 years ago

Unfortunately, we landed in Brazos County (only a slight step up.) Dunning-Kruger is omnipresent here.

[Majikthise]

12. I'm sure that Sugar Land is tough to handle...

But you haven't seen red state lunacy until you've seen where I live.... Wasilla Alaska.... Home of Talibunny. I have a really hard time continuing to like my hometown. I loved it here my whole life until Sarah put us on the Teahad map. Ugh.

[Mnpaul]

10. Too stupid to realize they are stupid

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is an astroturf front group started by oil billioniare David Koch and Richard Fink (a member of the board of directors of Koch Industries). AFP works together with the Koch family’s other conservative foundations and think tanks to disrupt Barack Obama's presidency. Accordingly, AFP has opposed health care reform, stimulus spending, and cap-and-trade legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air pollution that they create.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity

[gtar100]

13. I would correct the last statement - 'progressive' hasn't become a dirty word

except in the delusional minds of conservatives. But they aren't going to win that one. They beat on the word liberal for a long time and liberals failed to stand up against it when that crap could have been quashed. But 'progressive' won't have the same fate because, frankly, enough liberals/progressives are sick of the same old shit conservatives keep pulling. Being progressive is a damn good thing, so is community organizing, so is civil service, so is being a constitutional scholar, and so is being a liberal. We don't need to act like conservatives and lie to prove our point. No, we have history behind us. And thank god liberals and progressives are speaking up about it and not letting conservative lies stand unchallenged.

But great on Pap and Chauncey DeVega. Glad they are pointing out the elephant in the room.

[Enthusiast]

15. I know people exactly like

he describes.

[tclambert]

16. The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.

--William Butler Yeats, predicting the fall of our current civilization.

[spicegal]

17. Too stupid to know they're stupid, or simply proud of their

own stupidity. That was an interesting interview. All I can say is, if we care about this country and not turning it over to all this club wielding neanderthal nitwits, we progressives better start eating our Wheaties and get a lot tougher, and do it before the election.

[mwb970]

18. I always knew that the enormous and growing stupidity of our citizens would catch up with us someday

And here it is.

[dotymed]

22. IDIOCRACY,

the movie, I fear will be a road map for the future. It was supposed to be satire.
Just like the book, 1984, and Kafka's plays...

[ElsewheresDaughter]

21. The Dunning Kruger Effect....it's real.....

<snip>
Dunning and Kruger were awarded the Ig Nobel Prizes in Psychology in 2000 for their report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".
</snip>


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_kruger_effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.<1> The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."<2>

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed – albeit less scientifically – for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge")<3> and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."<4><5>). The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about.<6>) Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying.<7> Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt.<4> Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf<8> or driving a car.<4>

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University.<2><9> Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Dunning has since drawn an analogy ("the anosognosia of everyday life")<10><1> to a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability due to brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.
Supporting studies

Kruger and Dunning set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects consisting of Cornell undergraduates who were registered in various psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank. As Dunning and Kruger noted,

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.

more...

[Roland99]

25. Which is why we will ALWAYS have our "29 Percenters"

[vanbean]

27. Nice post, ED. As a matter of fact, about 5 years ago I hit my head very hard

and I had blood on my brain and I was out of it. What I have often said afterward is that when you're crazy, you don't know it. When I was in the hospital, I actually thought I was being tortured. I didn't recognize by own children, etc. I recovered 100% (except that I have dysosmia because my brain came forward and severed my olfactory nerve), but I can remember being crazy, so I have empathy for people affected as such.

[izquierdista]

39. Side note

Who did they use for their study? Why, the easily available pool of Cornell undergraduates. Can you imagine their results if they went to the nearest casino parking lot?

[ElsewheresDaughter]

40. or the Bush Admin?

[AlbertCat]

24. Any doubts about how smart and Know-it-all these folks might have had...

... any inkling of self-evaluation...

.... any slight notion that there might be another story....


has been squashed by religion. That's why religion and stupidity go together like peanut butter and jelly. Faith is the END of inquiry.

That's why Beck is playing evangelical preacher these days. That was his role at his lame rally.

[Roland99]

26. Blind faith and a fundamental belief in a specific religion.

Not all religion is bad. Or, maybe more accurately, spirituality.

[AlbertCat]

35. Not all religion is bad.

Well, I don't think all religious ideas are bad. But those come with so much garbage! Like DNA, 75% of it is junk.

[femrap]

28. This should be

a huge 'AH-HA' moment. It explains a lot to me.

Thank you for posting. I had just read about the Dunning-Kruger Effect recently.

[ooglymoogly]

29. Charles Darwin wrote; " Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".

Stupidity is trying to put itself in charge of everything; Uber alles. In this age that is what slavery is all about for these folks, as is Homophobia, as are all the other ignorant prejudices; For those are the only proofs these folks can make, by their bible thumping "wisdom" into something that they are better than. God is their excuse and the liberator of their stupidity into godliness in the likeness of their blond, blue eyed Sunday school Jesus.

They must become the blue eyed Aryans; The reason fascists and fascism is so dangerous; They do not understand or care about the damage they do with that authority even to the destruction of civilization; An authority they are ready to kill others to gain and maintain; The killing of millions; With the inevitable narrowing of civilization to the dumbest among us; A dead end in evolution.

The string pullers using these folks, think they can control them.....they can't. We are in for some cataclysmic stormy seas.

Rupert, has enabled and unleashed a headless Frankenstein monster and it is searching for its leader...and for many that emerging leader is the charlatan, Glen Beck; The new Hitler.

[breadandwine]

30. ••• Moore: 40 million illiterate. This is the UNDERLYING reason this country is so easy to brainwash

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9129927

[BrklynLiberal]

32. Willful ignorance is the same as evil....

[BrklynLiberal]

33. Once again it comes down to controlling the message, framing the debate

GAWD!!! WHEN ARE THESE DEMOCRATS GOING TO START IMPLEMENTING GEORGE LAKOFF'S IDEAS!!!
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml
Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics

By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 27 October 2003
.............................................................................................................................
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/08/25_lakoff.shtml
Linguistics professor George Lakoff dissects the "war on terror" and other conservative catchphrases
2004!!!!!!!!!
.............................................................................................................................
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/disaster-messaging_b_639040.html
Disaster Messaging

Democrats are constantly resorting to disaster messaging. Here's a description the typical situation.

* The Republicans outmessage the Democrats. The Democrats, having no effective response, face disaster: They lose politically, either in electoral support or failure on crucial legislation.
* The Democrats then take polls and do focus groups. The pollsters discover that extremist Republicans control the most common ("mainstream") way of thinking and talking about the given issue.
* The pollsters recommend that Democrats move to the right: adopt conservative Republican language and a less extreme version of conservative policy, along with weakened versions of some Democratic ideas.
* The Democrats believe that, if they follow this advice, they can gain enough independent and Republican support to pass legislation that, at least, will be some improvement on the extreme Republican position.
* Otherwise, the pollsters warn, Democrats will lose popular support -- and elections -- to the Republicans, because "mainstream" thought and language resides with the Republicans.
* Believing the pollsters, the Democrats change their policy and their messaging, and move to the right.
* The Republicans demand even more and refuse to support the Democrats.

We have seen this on issues like health care, immigration, global warming, finance reform, and so on. We are seeing it again on the Death Gusher in the Gulf. It happens even with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress
<snip>

.............................................................................................................................

http://markmaynard.com/?p=7501

<snip>
The best part of the article is the contribution by Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Here’s a highlight:

….Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining… It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

As Mr Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And here, according to the author of the article, is the big takeaway message from all of this… “If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best. There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots. As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.”
<snip>

[chervilant]

37. hmm...

To those who vilify, parody, ridicule, or otherwise denigrate the unfortunates among us who are factually challenged, please bear in mind that at least 40% of our adult population is functionally illiterate. Of those who can 'read,' another 60% cannot comprehend what they've read, nor can they give a defensible synopsis of the material they've read. Many of these unfortunates cling tenaciously to their world views, because fear--and the other visceral emotions that drive them--is a great motivator. Furthermore, any measurable self esteem in these pitiful individuals is often a thin veneer over a seething cauldron of insecurity and doubt.

The Corporate Megalomaniacs know this and use it well, both through their propaganda tools (the MSM, lobbyists, and paid political hacks) and through their skilled sustenance of the 'wealth carrot meme.' Moreover, the Corporatists continue to divide and conquer, regularly promulgating their partisan red herrings (which quite a number of us snarf regularly--regardless of party affiliation).

That old chestnut, "Ignorance is Bliss" carries new meaning for me. Perhaps, "controlled ignorance is bliss" might be a better way to look at it. I beg the non-ignorant among us to focus your energy and your analytical skills on ways we can help the unfortunates among us (variously labeled Teh Stoopid, teabaggers, right-wingers, DINOs and blue-dogs) to understand who is the real threat to their financial and social well-being.

Oh, and--at the risk of getting more backlash from some for whom this post resonates--our networking efforts need to intensify. Our efforts to work together to effect change MUST focus on stopping the exponential success of the Corporate Megalomaniacs, or we'll find ourselves hiding behind closed doors, avoiding any mention of a world view that challenges the controlling uber wealthy elite. Actually, how many of us are already there?

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

[Quantess]

38. This thread has 3588 views currently.

That means this is most likely linked on some other website. Maybe even a right wing, Beck-loving, website! I can just picture the comments: "Those DUmmy liberals are the stupid ones. Beck is really smart cuz he likes the founding fathers and he has a blackboard" :rofl: