Incompetents Don't know It: A Study

This study, written for the NY Times and published on page A-1 by the SF Chronicle, shows more than it thinks. Its advertised conclusion is that incompetent people aren't familiar enough with actual competence to know what it is that they don't have. So they rate themselves highly on the competence scale and are - falsely - confident in their competence. Truly competent people tend to downgrade their own competence.

"One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology."

What I found to be the most compelling piece of information was this:

"In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found."

It appears that these people did not receive the ability to reason from their educational experience. This insight is lost in the non-analytical writing that passes for journalistic science writing.

"And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that overconfidence is common; studies have found, for example, that the vast majority of people rate themselves as ``above average'' on a wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in statistical terms. This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy.

The proper presentation of this information would be as a condemnation of American education. Perhaps the writers of such articles should be given a "training session in logical reasoning".

A visit to atheist blogs would demonstrate the phenomenon in a more graphic manner. These blogs engage in personal attacks and exclusionary dialog that shows no trace of rationality. Yet these are the claimants of possession of superior abilities to think rational thoughts. It becomes obvious that adhering to scientism conveys a feeling, but not an actuality of competence.

Practicing objective thought based on principles of logic, unbiased by crowds of camp followers, is the source of competence. I suspect that most of the chronically incompetent could become competent, if only they wished to.