Yes, That Explains All Those Successful Dictatorships Doesn’t It?
If you are looking for an article from the MSM about how “we the people” are well frankly just too stupid to be trusted with our own governing and how we really really need Barack and Co. to take matters in to their own hands for our own stupid good to do what’s best for us in a fair-share way of course well then my friends here ya’ go
People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say
That’s the title, and it really tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it? Because these are scientists, my good man, not your average partisan. No, these are the types of folks who dispassionately interpret facts. As I mentioned above, clearly this premise is therefore supported by the wealth of data showing how amazingly successful dictatorships have been and how poorly democracies have performed, right?
Let’s move on to the body of the article
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it.
No, it doesn’t. Not in any way, shape or form, and such “reasonable” ideas like this are are well-oiled steps on the slippery slidey slope to autocratic fascism.
The assumption at the core of the democratic process is that the people have the right to choose. Sometimes they’ll choose well and sometimes they’ll choose poorly; it doesn’t matter. The key fundamental tenet is that the People, and not some self-appointed Order Of More Betters, has the right to be wrong.
But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The ‘unfortunate aspect of the human psyche’ this research is revealing is the Soviet-style classification of those who disagree with you as mentally deficient and unworthy of civil rights:
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
And the obvious solution to this is to deny them the ability to make these judgements.
As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.
“You (and that Rethuglican candidate you elected) are just too stupid to properly evaluate our Smart Ideas, which is why you are blocking them, so we’re just going to put them into effect anyway.”
Sound familiar?
He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people’s ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as “above average” — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]
I’m thinking there’s just a whole truckload of irony here that is going right over some people’s heads.
We’re just as undiscerning about the skills of others as about ourselves. “To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people,” Dunning said. In one study, the researchers asked students to grade quizzes that tested for grammar skill. “We found that students who had done worse on the test itself gave more inaccurate grades to other students.” Essentially, they didn’t recognize the correct answer even when they saw it.
Maybe, and I’m going way out on a limb here, just maybe they didn’t recognize the correct answer because…they didn’t know it? This is a big discovery how?
The reason for this disconnect is simple: “If you have gaps in your knowledge in a given area, then you’re not in a position to assess your own gaps or the gaps of others,” Dunning said.
Gaps in areas such as say humility or ego.
Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers.
In other words “academics” were never given the glory and praise due their complete and total awesomeness.
The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.
What we need is for the Most Competent Among Us to make all the decisions for us Incompetents.
And guess which category Intellectuals fall in to?
Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger’s theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters’ own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.
Let’s see: you assume most are ‘average’ and don’t allow average to recognize ‘better than average’ and you express shock that ‘average’ wins every time? This is “science”? What exactly are “leadership skills” anyway?
Us “normal” and “incompetent” people are very capable of recognizing when others are smarter than us; however, unlike the Smarter folks we are also very capable of recognizing that the Smarter folks are just a capable of being wrong on an issue as us Morons.
The difference being of course that we can admit our errors.
Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they “effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.”
No, their advantage is “merely” that the people are free.
And a crucial, if not the crucial, component of Freedom the the freedom to be wrong.
Life, Media, Morality, Nanny State, Politics | Mr. Bingley | 
March 5, 2012 8:50 am
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He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills.
Irony doesn’t begin to cover this. Hypocrisy is a good start. Arrogance ought to finish it.
And a crucial, if not the crucial, component of Freedom the the freedom to be wrong.
Spot on. If we want a choice — which is what the Constitution is set up to provide — we have to live with being wrong from time to time. Which, by the way, is a fact of life, whether one lives in the United States or Zimbabwe. The primary difference is how the mistakes are handled.
With the “no failure” mode of thinking so in vogue these days, along with intellectual snobbishness, many people prefer to pretend mistakes never happen. As these so-called “scientists”, a majority of the government bureaucracy, and many of our elected official clearly demonstrate on a constant basis.
We are so boned.
David Dunning, master of projection. He’s living proof why psychologists have such a high suicide rate.
I blame the schools and the media for this.
The schools for not teaching students how to think, and the media for not giving us anything substantial to think about.
I’m guessing these guys never heard the adage “B students work for C students — A students teach.”
It loses pithiness, but I’d amend that to “… A students teach or obtain government grants in order to preach”.
Also, I for one am not so enamored of the scope and skill sets required for governance that I’d be targeting it for our “best” people. Particularly if one begins with the assumption that governance only comes into play on those things which cannot be better achieved individually or locally.
That’s why we have a representative republic, not a democracy.
One question – when did psychologists become ‘scientists’? The field of study is not science – it deals with no ‘body of facts’, has no ‘systematic arrangement’, shows no ‘operation of general laws’, and (most importantly) is not falsifiable.
Psychologist=bed wetting thumbsuckers. I’m not an “expert” in medicine but I damn well can pick good doctors over lousy ones and recognize junk science to the real thing and this is most definitely junk science.
Yes, but the PhD lets them wet other’s beds too.
Agreed aelfheld…
“He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills.”
Beam, meet eye.
Bill Buckley was known to observe that he would rather be ruled by the people who were listed as the first two hundred names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard U. The former would do far less damage than the latter, and probably do a better job.
The Great Minds, like D, Dunning Ph.D., sneered at both Eisenhower and Reagan. From the point of view of actual accomplishment, they were two of the three greatest presidents in 20th century America. So much for the judgement of the Great Minds.
Wow! kick butt,Mr. Bingley,
you’re awesome.You’re smarter
than you look,Hah!Hah!
That’s a pretty low bar, Greg!
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas.
Besides accidentally explaining the current administration and its appointees, what has this guy accomplished, really? We hardly needed SCIENCE! to tell us that President Sand Wedge is full of fail.