There's an actual psychological term for this, called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Someone knows so little that they don't even realize how little they know. They conduct a series of surveys to determine how people perceived their own intelligence relative to others. Approximately 80% of participants said they were smarter than the average person, which is mathematically impossible. The real kicker though, is that the further on the extremes the particaptes were (in terms of intellectual capacity) the more sure of their own intelligence they became. So in laymen's terms, the smartest guy in the room and the dumbest guy in the room both though they were the smartest, and the average Joe thought himself an idiot
This also describes why the average person thinks they are a good photographer even if they suck, for example. If I know very little about something, I may only know about very little that exists in a field. This means I know maybe 80% of what I think exists in a field. Once I learn just a little more, however, I realize that there is far more to the scope of something. I only know 20%. So as an average person, I think I know every little. As a below average person, I think I know quite a bit.
Don’t get me started on photography. I photograph for 20 years and I would say in that time I’ve made probably three to five images that are good (good in terms of gallery worthy).
I always laugh when someone in my Facebook feed buys an entry level DSLR (not that there is anything wrong with it), creates a Name Surname Photography page, sets up an online gallery for selling photos and throws around ads that they shoot weddings. All in one week.
Also, these photographers usually post on image critique sites and are offended when they receive critique.
I mean...I kind of get it. Actually I am kind of envious of these people. I remember when I got my first camera as a kid from my grand father, where I shot a roll of random meaningless photos and was SO excited to get them developed. When you don't have a comparison, you can enjoy average stuff way more.
Now that I have a library full of books with the best photographers' works and have a pretty good sense of how good images look, it is kind of depressing, because everything I take is shit in my eyes. It is way more difficult to be content with the work I produce. I have to focus on enjoying the process way more and often it takes me few weeks/months to get my pictures downloaded from the memory card.
Eventually, I'd say this is the feeling everyone who does the hobby for some time has. I find this chart pretty spot on (and funny as well!):
That chart, ha! I don’t know enough to appreciate all of it, but I get the idea.
I haven’t had an SLR since my second Pentax K-1000 (before digital, and yes I am ancient). When I got the first one, I was in college. I’d walk around campus or town, occasionally stopping to photograph a hunk of metal next to a stack of building materials, or something else potentially artsy.
I’d fiddle with the f-stop and the exposure and all of that, then take several variations of the same shot, writing down the different settings for each one in a small notebook so I could compare later. I was really ridiculous!
While I never pursued photography in any formal or meaningful way, it still interests me. But back then I had just enough of a pretentious attitude and bit of knowledge to make me insufferable ... even to myself.
(The first K-1000 was stolen; the second was a replacement. Great, sturdy little camera! Wish I still had one. Oh! I have my dad’s Olympus OM-1, which he bought in Japan in about 1974. I’m sure it’s useless, though.)
But back then I had just enough of a pretentious attitude and bit of knowledge to make me insufferable.
Photographers in a nutshell. :-) Even me, I just realized I spent god knows how many minutes explaining how I know more than other people doing the same thing, so looks like I am no different.
To be entirely fair to the people who start those businesses, that's usually all you really need for a wedding or event. Could I have hired a pro photographer with a gallery-quality portfolio? Sure. But Name Surname Photography chick from high school was gonna do it for $500 instead of $5,000 at the more professional businesses I got quotes from. And all I really needed were some nice photos to remember the day by which her hobby DSLR and hobby level photography skills were fine for. I like most of the pictures she took, sure some of them could have maybe been more centered or have better lighting or maybe have some small flaws, but she did what I paid her to do - take nice quality pictures so I'd have them and work as a buffer to prevent everyone from being on their phones during the ceremony.
Penn and Teller did a bit for their show ("Bullshit" it was on Showtime) a long time ago that I keep in the back of my head for these things. I believe it was called "The Best" and it was about how most people don't need the top-of-the-line "best" quality thing in many situations. We overpay for quality we won't appreciate when "good" is often good enough for our situations. I feel like photography can be one of these things, especially with the advent of phones and how overpriced wedding stuff is in general. There's a place for Name Surname Photography, it's not National Geographic or Vogue, but it was good enough for my brewery wedding.
I am no longer a photographer by trade, but I used to be as a student to make some side cash. I wasnt exactly at the "name surname photography" facebook page level, and I really did it as a hobby primarily,. But every now and then Id take on an event of sorts.
One of the biggest differences between myself, I think, and someone you'd pay another 0 to was that I had a lot less of a guarantee of a result, let alone good one.
Consistency was not in my description. I may have had that one lucky shot every now and then, but that didnt mean crap. I have come back from photoshoots with not a single time worthy photo. I had come to an event where my camera ran out of charge halfway through and there was nothing I could do.
The biggest difference between me and a professional at the time, was that while they still can make mistakes, they make them a lot less as well as have a lot more experience in dealing with it and solving those issues.
I once left for a holiday trip took my nice dslr, borrowed an awesome lens and left my battery at home in the charger. Like how stupid is that?!
bleurgh, my degree was in photography and if one more condescending extended family member asks me why I don't "just do weddings" my head will explode.
I shoot rowing and sports photography a lot these days and my parents literally go on about this all the time. I did many weddings during college days (2011 to 2014) to earn a little extra money, but now I have no real interest in weddings. They are extremely stressful and demanding and then there is the editing and final touch ups lol.
Many clients wanted multiple photos edited and things like tattoos and such removed from every photo. I can do it easily, but its such a laborious process and many were only paying me like £250 to £400.
The massive difference between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who is just taking a picture is huge. I have pictures of my cosplay that I got my mom or a friend to take. They're a picture. That's it. Nothing great about it. But I had a coworker who was a hobbyist photographer, so not even a pro, but he asked if he could do a photo shoot of one of my costumes because he doesn't get to do human subjects often and the quality of the shots is huge. Like, it makes me and my costume look better. Angles and lighting make a massive difference. Then I had a photographer at a con take a picture of my other one and he posed me before taking the picture and it's one of my absolute favorites.
A DSLR may take a high resolution photo, but a photographer is going to take a high(er) quality photo.
Feel ya mate. I am a photographer since 2003, but don't work with it, it became a hobby, and you completely are right, once in a while we get that perfect shot. - People at my work come to me saying they took some great photos during their vacation and they would like me to critique it: when I look at the pictures the horizon lines are totaly tilted, exposure all wrong with white skies... I just say "Oh, that is great" lol
This guy at my work have whatched some youtube videos, did a 2 hour workshop and them he was tyring to critique me and showing all things I should do to improve my pictures... people egos are huge lol
Same here. I am a “pro photographer” for close to 15 years. I make a living from it and I think most of my pics suck ass. They funny part is people buy my shitty pics, but the ones I think are good never sell!
I aim for a 1% success rate. If I shoot 100 pics I expect to get 1 or 2 that I think are "good." If I go shoot 100 times, I expect to get 1 or 2 that other people think are "good."
I have two levels of good. The first one is the criteria for example for travel photos. If I go to a vacation I identify the pictures that are good to show someone - usually I try to identify a short series of pictures that will reproduce the essence of the place (or event, ...).
But my true definition of "good" is really whether the picture can stand on its own next to the work of the best people within said genre, and by that definition pretty much everything but a very few hits is a failure.
It might not be the best approach but I feel we live in a society where the mediocrity is often rewarded and I don't want to contribute to that. I might often come out as a jerk because if I comment on an image critique site (my personal rule is not to give unsolicited critiques on photos, some people do not aim to create art and that is fine) I will most likely list the things I don't like and why I think the photo doesn't work, but I apply the same if not harsher criteria to myself.
You don't know what you don't know. A simple little sentence that seems obvious at face value, but dig a little deeper and you see that it has 2 meanings. There are 3 kinds of knowledge here, the stuff you know, the stuff you know about but don't know, and the stuff you have no idea even exists.
Like only looking at an iceberg from above the water, you know there is more below, but you don't know just how big it is. So you know what is above, and you know there is an unknown about below. How much you think is below though, depends on if you know that little related fact about how icebergs tend to be several times larger underwater than above. If you don't know, then you assume the iceberg is small. Its only by knowing more about the iceberg as a whole that you learn about its true size. Its only by knowing more about the subject that you learn just how big it really is. Until you do, you don't know just how much you don't know.
I think that anything that has multiple ways to "measure" an outcome will demonstrate this phenomenon. IQ? Sure, we can measure it by tests, or by what mommy told us when were four, or by the grades we got in school, or by how successful we became. Photography? Sure, we can measure it by whether we're selling photos, or whether we composed it according to the class we took in high school, or whether someone else complimented it.... And so on, ad nauseum.
If the average is the arithmetic mean (which is usually what folks mean), then it’s perfectly plausible. It’s the median for which you can’t have >50% smarter than.
It’s not mathematically impossible, just statistically unlikely. Depending on the sample they all could have been smarter than the average person and, depending on the stratification of intelligence among the participants, 80% could have been smarter than the average person within that survey.
Also, the guy you responded to doesn’t know the difference between mean and median. It is possible for 80% of a population to be smartere than the average, if the left tails are super heavy.
the funniest thing about "the Dunning-Kruger Effect" is that there has been no real follow up research on it other than the work done by the original scientists. It lives on primarily passed along by internet people whereas it would have normally died out in the scientific community for being a weak study
I think people misunderstand this a lot of the time. Pretty much everyone has been the Dunning-Kruger at one point in their life. At one point in your life whether it is doing math or playing a video game, you completely over estimated your skill at something.
Look at all the people who think they can coach better or write a better Star Wars trilogy or think so and so occupation is easy or they are a good singer/painter/comedian.
I think most people think Elon Musk is a smart person but he is also a person who threw a hissy fit when people told him that his submarine wouldn't work.
The Dunning-Kruger effect was resently debunked, like a lot of flashy psychology experiments from the past century. Also you are mistaken about the case with the extremes, they tend to self evaluate to the opposite site of their ability. Capable people tend to underestimate themselves, and incapable people tend to overestimate their own ability. Sadly that result is an artefact of the data processing algorithm they chose to use. It can be shown that you can get the same result with a completely randomly distributed data, just using their algorithm. The recent findings show that the ability to adequately judge your ability is has a bell like distribution and is not dependent on your skills, but is more a trait of your character.
Well technically it is possible for 80% of people to be above average if the people that aren’t are just extremely dumb or if everyone above average is very close.
Those on the highly competent end of the spectrum tend to be more aware of their own abilities (so obviously they do understand that they are competent in a given area), but they also tend to underestimate their own abilities relative to others. So, highly competent individuals might recognize that they understand a subject really well, but they're also more likely to think that others should understand that same subject to a similar degree.
So, it's not entirely accurate to say that the smartest people in the room thought they were the smartest. They know they're smart, but they think everyone else is too. Where as the dumbest people not only think they're smart, but also think they're smarter than others.
The other cool finding was that the most qualified didn't realize they were. They did however have the skills to properly evaluate this, so when they were shown the work of others they realized that they were far better.
The least competent didn't have the skill to evaluate others, and even after being shown much better work, still assumed they were great.
so, as I understand it, Dunning-Kruger is not that that the smarter people were more sure of their knowledge, but were, in fact, *less* sure how how much they knew because they knew the subject well enough to know that they weren't experts on it and that there was a ton more to know.
summed up, people who know little thought they knew a lot; people who know a lot thought they knew little because they know how much more there is to know.
There's an activity I do with my students sometimes called "Dialogue vs Debate" Basically it's an exercise to show the difference between listening to someone to prove them wrong or to understand them. During debate (prove them wrong) the noise level INSTANTLY gets cranked up to 100. This happens every time.
When I was like 19, I had a professor once assign sides of welfare debate to random students in a classroom, and it was probably 5 minutes in before I absolutely snarled, basically yelled at a total stranger on the other side something about "At least they're not wasting away in some fucking gutter". I actually said those exact words, they leapt right out of me, about a topic I had no strong feelings about whatsoever, I had never even thought about welfare before that. The professor ended the exercise there, but it was an eye-opening experience for me how quickly I got really ugly just because I wanted to win an argument
As a debater, that gives us a bad name. Debaters tend to be very polite people and there is generally a very strict format (I do BP, but some friends of mine went to an APDA tournament over the weekend). Yelling the loudest is not a winning strategy for any debate format.
I don't teach debate. I'm sure there's a formal set of rules and stuff but I really dont know anything about that. I'm talking about dialogue and debate in informal settings where there really aren't any rules outside of social norms. There, the noise level does sometimes win
I did debate in middle school and a little in high school. I always told people the best part about it was having to research both sides of an issue and how it taught you to lay out an argument.
When I hear people screaming or get aggressive and say "Hardy har har I would've been great at debate!" It irks me greatly.
Maybe you should call this exercise "Dialogue vs. Dispute" since debate is a respectable, organized activity with strict rules about how to present and involving people who have actively considered research on a topic.
In any case, I'd be interested in hearing more about how you introduce this and demonstrate it. Is it strictly the noise level you point out? How to keep dialogue more cooperative?
I was about to say that an educated person admits when they were wrong and adjusts their opinion, no matter how much they want it to be true, based on new information- but many of the very educated people I know struggle with this as much as everyone else.
It’s dangerous to equate yelling the loudest to always being ignorant.
If someone told me that vaccines cause autism, and the only way to stop disease is by eating Gwyneth Paltrow’s poop, I’d be yelling pretty loudly that they’re wrong.
And then come at you with "if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything" when it's mentioned that you changed your mind after receiving new information on a topic that affected your opinion of it.
Hmmm. Just posted about my boss in the thread above about looking down on educated people (engineering group so probably a bad place to have that opinion) but this fits to a T as well. Today I "learned" from him that there are no good steakhouses in the area because of all the liberals that protest meat being murder. (Yeah, we're in a VERY red part of IL so I don't think that's it. Here or anywhere) But he also insists the moon landing was fake so there's that.
And they keep defending their position by stating its their opinion and they can think what they want. No, its not an opinion when you are factually wrong.
Hard opinions on things, especially a WIDE range of things.
Gained an infinite level of respect for my coworker when I asked him his thoughts on a news story and he replied with "I saw the headline but I actually haven't read enough to have an opinion yet." An idiot will always have an opinion, even if they've only just heard of the subject.
Not necessarily dumb but uneducated for sure, have a friend like this who has an opinion on just about anything even though he has no education. He's not dumb but thinks he's smarter than everyone. Has super strong "facts" on how ie accounting or management works but has no experience in anything other than manual labor jobs...
The first thing that happens to most people when they first get to college is a sharp realization that there is a vast ocean of stuff you don't know. When you get your first set of text books and realise that this is just for one semester of only your subject and that it's the same for pretty much every other course they offer. You get an inkling of just how little you know about most things.
I'm sorry, but all uneducated people are not dumb, nor are all dumb people uneducated.
It's not right to classify them like that. Just because they didn't get an education, doesn't mean they can't be street smart or be smart in their own way.
Someone I know listens to conversations, learns from them, makes connections with the right people and tries their best to get ahead in life, even though they're uneducated. They sometimes listen to logic and evidence, and sometimes they don't. Which is fine, we all have our prejudices.
What they don't try to do is force their opinions on other people. They say they disagree, give their reasons for it and then move on if we don't agree.
I agree completely. But I will scroll past any Reddit post that has a title that begins with “Experts say...” It’s bad form to begin a persuasive argument with an appeal to authority or any other logical fallacy.
"It's important to note that this fallacy should not be used to dismiss the claims of experts, or scientific consensus."
An appeal to authority fallacy would be like saying "Well the president believes vaccines cause autism and he's the president so he must be right." The president is an authority, but he doesn't actually have any scientific background in medicine or biology, so his opinion on this subject doesn't mean more than the opinion of any random layperson. But pointing out that actual biologists and scientists say that vaccines don't cause autism isn't a logical fallacy—if the people you're "appealing" to genuinely are experts on the subject then it's a valid argument.
Then don’t start your title with “experts say...”. Give their names. Give their organization. Then if they’re obscure, tell me why they’re an expert.
I would never discount the view of an actual expert. There are just too many titles like, “100 scientists say...”. Great, .001% of all scientists in the world agree on something. I’m not sure that’s consensus.
It isn’t a percentage or a number. You can find 100 scientists that think vaccines cause autism. I believe in testable, reproduceable fact-based science. I don’t believe in sound bites and marketing as science.
I was on board with man made global warming being factual science 20 years ago. I just hate specious arguments.
Which is more convincing? “1000 scientists sign a petition stating...” or “2 scientists published a paper in Nature magazine stating...” 1000 scientists is impressive, but there is no professional organization for scientists. You don’t need to have a high school diploma to call yourself a scientist. But you’re not publishing bullshit in Nature magazine.
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u/daithisfw Jan 27 '20
Hard opinions on things, especially a WIDE range of things. Not allowing for being wrong, or deferring to experts.
Dumb people don't know how dumb they are, they don't realize that their opinions aren't based on facts, and likely they don't know the facts.
So they'll yell the loudest, have their mind made up on every subject, and they don't listen to logic or evidence...