THE MOST OBVIOUS CASE IN POINT!
Posted on 02/19/2011 7:10:05 PM PST by dennisw
Charles Darwin observed “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” That was certainly true in 1995 when a man named McArthur Wheeler boldly robbed two banks in Pittsburgh without using a disguise. Security camera footage of him was broadcast on the evening news the same day as the robberies, and he was arrested an hour later. Mr. Wheeler was surprised when the police explained how they had used the surveillance tapes to catch him. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled incredulously. He seemed to believe that rubbing his face with lemon juice would blur his image and make him impossible to catch.
In movies, criminal masterminds often are geniuses, James Bond villains in volcano lairs. But the stereotype doesn’t apply to actual cons, at least not the ones who get caught.
Studies show those convicted of crimes are, on average, less intelligent than non-criminals.
Sixty-six-year-old Samuel Porter tried to pass a one-million-dollar bill at a supermarket in the United States and became irate when the cashier wouldn’t make change for him. All these people seem to have been under what we call the “illusion of confidence,” which is the persistent belief that we are more skilled than we really are — in this case, that the criminals were so good they would not get caught.
This tendency for the least skilled among us to overestimate their abilities the most has more serious consequences than an inflated sense of humor or chess ability. Everyone has encountered obliviously incompetent managers who make life miserable for their underlings because they suffer from the illusion of confidence. And as the joke reminds us, the people who graduate last in their medical school class are still doctors; what is less funny is that they probably believe they are still the best ones.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Entire article is worth reading
ping
I’ve always believed that some self doubt is a good thing as long as it doesn’t discourage trying.
The authors of this article seem pretty confident of themselves.
You can’t think critically if you are unable to doubt.
Dear Leader Zero thinks more government spending on mostly stupid stuff and huge gubermint teams to oversee that the stupidity is properly applied will achieve utopia. It might, but the person overseeing our utopia is likely Alinsky’s hero satan.
I’m going to try that lemon juice trick. I think maybe either he didn’t rub it all over his face or he didn’t say the magic words. Invisibility is one of my most prized assets.
A corollary of this, speaking as an ex-grade school basketball coach, are people who think their own kids or their kid’s teams were much better than anyone elses. I have a friend who not only overestimated his own athletic ability, he overestimated his son’s ability. Not that he or his son were poor athletes, in fact they were both very good. But they were simply not as good as my friend thought they were. Probably a very common and natural feeling.
I’ve never seen myself as a leader but I’ve always always landed in leadership positions like factory foreman. I guess the fact that I constantly check and recheck my work has made me successful at things like that.
On the other hand, as a foreman I was always leery of the new guys who claimed to already know how to do the job.
Oh yes.
-- Francis Bacon
Back in the mid-1980’s, Alice Lakwena, leader of the LRA rebel group in Uganda, told her followers they would be bullet-proof & invincible after rubbing their bodies with her magic oil. Thus protected they proceeded to attack Ugandan army outposts, armed mostly with sticks & stones.
Crazy, you say? Yep, but the situation was complicated by the fact that not only did the LRA rebels believe that they were protected by the magic oil, the Ugandan army had heard the story and THEY believed it also!
So, rebels with sticks & stones routed trained soldiers armed with AK-47s and more.
Crazy world!
It also showed that the very best students underestimated their abilities and almost always thought that they could have done better.
I, on the other hand, am invincible.
Skillfully bookmarked.
One of the classic hallmarks of a liberal is someone who thinks that they are not only smarter than they really are, but they are thoroughly convinced that they are indisputedly smarter than you are as well.
Maybe they’re right if they’re experienced at doing almost identical tasks at some other organization or have better training than even you. Oftentimes you have to set them straight, which can be difficult, certainly. New guys tend to make all other surrounding employees somewhat leery, and most new hires are a comparatively risky, initially dubious asset. But most of the time I’d argue that it’s mutually beneficial if both parties say what needs to be said out in the open without letting their emotions get the better of them and don’t assume anything. A foreman ought to know this better than anyone below him.
Either Obama is delusional to the point that he’s a danger to both himself and the rest of the country ...or he’s the king of con men. I think his problem is a mixture of both. Really good liars can believe their own lies.
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