Studies have shown that the most confident of people This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Wikipedia defines it this way:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in two principal ways: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate.
Judge Tyrie Boyer is a perfect example of this. Supremely confident, yet supremely uninformed, Judge Boyer makes a dangerous composition. Boyer makes rulings without having read the pleading, blocks information for years, and then allows it later when he has already ruled, and in general
To make matters worse,
he finds his own inexperience and unprepared humorous. Do we really want Judges who value the health of children so cheaply that they think being inexperienced is funny?
In short, as Dunning-Kruger shows, incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, fail to recognize genuine skill in others (e.g. experts), and fail to recognize their own inadequacy. Tyrie Boyer demonstrates the dangers of doing so.
If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. […] the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.
—David Dunning
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