Errol Morris’s new piece in the NYTimes is fascinating to me, as I’ve always noodled the Dunning-Kruger effect around in my mind. And I’ve long held the belief that we act in a social system governed by confirmation bias; that is, we tend towards what we believe or want to believe, both in our learning and actions.
Morris, in his piece, really gets into the holes in our knowledge and how they effect our behavior. This fascinates me, because I’ve been on both sides of conversations that were heated and full of energy only to find one of us was entirely ignorant of an adjunct area of knowledge that played heavily in the rounder conversation.
In Morris’s piece, David Dunning writes:
If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life.
Today’s bit in the NYTimes if part one of five. Can’t wait for the rest.
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