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It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge,

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!

Bargs 12y ago
Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the article: "The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Not to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks. This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/ * with apologies to Pendleton Ward.
- freshflowers 12y ago
  There is a world of difference between being ignorant of your own ignorance and just making shit up when confronted with your ignorance.
mironathetin 12y ago
"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … " I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about the bad impression it makes in a meeting, if you repeatedly say: I don't know.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  Is this even necessarily a bad thing? Aside from the cover-your-ass aspect of it, I find this tends to spark healthy debate, even if someone's ego gets bruised in the mean time. The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard. I've worked really hard in the past few years to say "I don't know" even when I'm supposed to project expertise. I haven't encountered any real resistance to it, though doing the opposite does inspire confidence, particularly when you're trying to sell a product or service.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    > The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard. If I had a penny for every time I've seen that, I'd have a pretty big pile of coins.
    - marincounty 12y ago
      I have found that 95% of the people will side with the person who has the most control of a situation. Many times that person is the Blowhard, but too many times that person or entity is the boss,wealthy parent, or teacher. When I was in school, I was surprised how few students would correct the teacher. I understood they were concerned about grades, but there's a point where I literally wanted to strangle a teacher, or boss. I came close, and my grades suffered. As to bosses, I would quit, or hurt them "the old faschioned way". Right now, my biggest gripe with people who "just go along with" is our current treatment of the Homeless. I don't understand how people can debate on what to do, or turn a blind eye when cops try to fix the problem with the "fix the crack in the window" theory.
jessejhernandez 12y ago
Yeah it is fascinating how people refuse to acknoweledge ignorance. Personally I view ignorance in a positive connotation because it promotes growth and learning which are vital assets to prevent stagnation and allow innovation to emerge.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Eponysterical :-) I'm very fond of a book called The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, which proffers a difficult-to-falsify but still compelling conjecture of why this should be. As you'd expect from such an ambitious title it requires an awful lot of handwaving, and accordingly it is viewed as heretodoxy in academic circles.
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
In most common, trivial real life situations, you have an advantage if you keep spewing forth nonsense and adjust for mistakes as you go along and keep pushing forward semi-blindly - compared to being forever hesitant in search for perfect truth. The "confident idiot" basically applies a Monte Carlo search over the range of possibilities, and may eventually fall onto a good-enough solution. I suspect that's the explanation for the D-K effect. If that's the case, then the "idiot" actually uses a pretty sophisticated overall strategy that works well in a fluid world (so not so much an idiot actually).
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times: 1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness. 2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation. 3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today). It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed. The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism. > ike a little tv in their head, power up and go. This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me. > So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius! The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient). One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.

Bargs 12y ago

Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the article: "The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."

anigbrowl 12y ago
Not to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks. This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/ * with apologies to Pendleton Ward.
freshflowers 12y ago
There is a world of difference between being ignorant of your own ignorance and just making shit up when confronted with your ignorance.

mironathetin 12y ago

"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … " I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about the bad impression it makes in a meeting, if you repeatedly say: I don't know.

nkozyra 12y ago
Is this even necessarily a bad thing? Aside from the cover-your-ass aspect of it, I find this tends to spark healthy debate, even if someone's ego gets bruised in the mean time. The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard. I've worked really hard in the past few years to say "I don't know" even when I'm supposed to project expertise. I haven't encountered any real resistance to it, though doing the opposite does inspire confidence, particularly when you're trying to sell a product or service.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  > The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard. If I had a penny for every time I've seen that, I'd have a pretty big pile of coins.
  - marincounty 12y ago
    I have found that 95% of the people will side with the person who has the most control of a situation. Many times that person is the Blowhard, but too many times that person or entity is the boss,wealthy parent, or teacher. When I was in school, I was surprised how few students would correct the teacher. I understood they were concerned about grades, but there's a point where I literally wanted to strangle a teacher, or boss. I came close, and my grades suffered. As to bosses, I would quit, or hurt them "the old faschioned way". Right now, my biggest gripe with people who "just go along with" is our current treatment of the Homeless. I don't understand how people can debate on what to do, or turn a blind eye when cops try to fix the problem with the "fix the crack in the window" theory.

jessejhernandez 12y ago

Yeah it is fascinating how people refuse to acknoweledge ignorance. Personally I view ignorance in a positive connotation because it promotes growth and learning which are vital assets to prevent stagnation and allow innovation to emerge.

anigbrowl 12y ago

Eponysterical :-) I'm very fond of a book called The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, which proffers a difficult-to-falsify but still compelling conjecture of why this should be. As you'd expect from such an ambitious title it requires an awful lot of handwaving, and accordingly it is viewed as heretodoxy in academic circles.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

In most common, trivial real life situations, you have an advantage if you keep spewing forth nonsense and adjust for mistakes as you go along and keep pushing forward semi-blindly - compared to being forever hesitant in search for perfect truth. The "confident idiot" basically applies a Monte Carlo search over the range of possibilities, and may eventually fall onto a good-enough solution. I suspect that's the explanation for the D-K effect. If that's the case, then the "idiot" actually uses a pretty sophisticated overall strategy that works well in a fluid world (so not so much an idiot actually).

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

> It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times: 1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness. 2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation. 3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today). It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed. The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism. > ike a little tv in their head, power up and go. This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me. > So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius! The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient). One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.