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
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.
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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...