Dunning-Kruger Effect was first discovered by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999. What the authors found was people who have little knowledge think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge. But isn’t this liberalism as we know it? I believe liberals suffer from Dunning-Kruger Effect and do not realize it.
What the authors found out about D-K Effect was that the “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Four key points are noteworthy:
- Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
- Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
- Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
- If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
Unfortunately, for many liberals, they can not achieve number four on the list so change never takes place. We conservatives often wonder why liberals say the dumbest things. For example, Harry Reid saying, “the war is lost” was just plain stupid. Now we know: Dunning-Kruger Effect. Consider some of these liberal quotations:
“George Bush giving tax cuts is like Jim Jones giving Kool-Aid. It tastes good but it’ll kill you”? –Al Sharpton
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? –Kayne West
“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” –Hillary Clinton
These examples and thousands more exist. What other reason would liberals say such asinine things? It has to be Dunning-Kruger Effect!
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Dear sports, this is a very favourite analysis of the Left Liberal to radical ‘mind’ such as it is. It’s from onecosmos dot blogspot dot com. Dig it. Colonel Neville.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Islamists and Leftists have a “logic” that serves their needs, not truth.
With projection and denial prominent.
In the unconscious mind, where symmetrical logic rules the night, the stronger the emotion one is feeling, the more “symmetrical deductions” are likely to occur. For example, as Bomford writes, on a deep unconscious level, “one who hates has to believe that his or her hatred is returned.” Note that this is a logical operation, only based upon a different sort of logic. This logic is no doubt the source of the psychotic fear of Israel in the Islamic world.
Their unconscious hatred is so profound that it simultaneously reverses the relation, so that they can’t help perceiving that Israel hates them. But Israelis just want to shop, raise their families, or read the Torah. They couldn’t care less about Muslims, except to the extent that bloodthirsty Muslim barbarians harbor murderous rage toward them.
It’s fine to hate evil, but in the Islamic world, what is hated is transformed into evil. Something is not hated because it is evil, but evil because it is hated. One could say the same of the left, which habitually fears what it eternally hates.
The left cannot be comprehended unless one appreciates the extent of their unbound hatred. Once this is grasped, what seems illogical is suddenly seen to obey the dictates of symmetrical logic. For example, the unconscious feeling that I hate America and want us to lose in Iraq is transformed to General Petraeus is a traitor, or I am a racist becomes America is racist, or I am unbearably envious becomes the wealthy are engaged in class warfare against me!
Another characteristic of the unconscious is that it is timeless, in the sense that it can reverse temporal relations. For example, in the unconscious mind, if A is the cause of B, B can also be the cause of A. Thus, “before” and “after” become meaningless. Therefore, although we were inexcusably attacked by Islamists on 9-11, within minutes, leftists were saying that the real reason for the attack was that we had done something to offend Muslims.
Likewise, throughout the Cold War, leftist scholars wrote “revisionist” histories, in which the United States was the cause of the Cold War, or at least equally responsible for it. You will notice that there are no conservative revisionists who write, for example, that blacks were the cause of their own lynching, or that Japanese Americans were the cause of their own internment. You can only think in this manner if you are pathologically under the sway of unconscious symmetrical logic.
Also in the unconscious mind, there is no distinction between the memory of something that actually occurred vs. the memory of a fantasy. Here we can understand how and why the left is so prone to mythologizing the past, as their fantasies are mingled with reality. Thus, no amount of reality and asymmetrical logic will ever convince them that FDR made the Great Depression worse, not better, or that the black family only began to disintegrate after the imposition of all the “Great Society” programs of the mid to late ’60s.
No amount of logic could convince a leftist that his policies harm the “little guy,” since his ruling myth, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is that he is here to rescue the hapless little guy (for whom the leftist always feels rich contempt in the unconscious mind, contempt which only seeps out everywhere).
One thing you will notice about the left is that they are passionate. Because the left is guided by feelings and intentions, they are blind to the results of their actions. If their feelings are infinitely good, then in the unconscious mind, the results must also be infinitely good.
As I have written before, this is a religious passion in the absence of religion, so it has no traditional means to structure and channel it. Just as religion partakes of symmetrical logic in an adaptive way (i.e., the meek shall inherit the earth, the Golden Rule, humans are made in the image of the Creator, etc.), leftists do so in a terribly unhealthy way.
That is, because of the intensity of their feelings, these feelings reach way down into the symmetrical realm, with no way to structure or make sense of them. This is why you always see so much highly charged, “unfiltered” unconscious material coming out of the left. To borrow a metaphor from someone, reading dailykos or huffington post is like taking a ride through a sewer in a glass bottom boat.
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/09/patterned-irrationality-of-left.html
Thanks for your post. It was a very intelligently thought out comment.