You’re probably wrong, but so am I

The kind of people who read my blog (all 6 of you) probably know of the Dunning Kruger effect.

The general knowledge goes something like this graph:

snapshot

Basically it starts that you know nothing but don’t know it and then you know stuff but don’t know stuff (often people will tell others about this part and explain that it’s the scientific evidence of the Imposter Syndrome [I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this])  and then eventually you know what you know.

Now that’s all nice and fun. But it’s actually not what was in the actual paper.
Here are the actual graphs from the paper:

That’s a pretty far cry from that graph I found while googling Dunning-Kruger.

It appears many other “wisdom meme” like this may be false such as the “fact” more money might in fact mean more happiness and that hedonistic adaptation and happiness might not be as strong as we thought. ( This all comes from a great post here: http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ ).

Now the goal of this post is not actually to talk about how wrong I am / you were (despite my clickbait title). What I actually think the goal of learning this should be is that we should be compassionate with one another. I see lots of people be it with the US election, Brexit, the migrant crisis, economic policies etc that are really demeaning towards people who don’t share their opinions. Now the thing is, odds are you are wrong on a great deal of those topics so be kind to others who disagree with you, because while they might be wrong, there’s a good chance you are as well.