Surface Detail
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2016
- Messages
- 3,244
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- Location
- English Midlands
- Gender
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- Political Leaning
- Centrist
A very good reply to this question by Lee Thé, on Quora:
"One facet of low intelligence is lack of self-assessment ability. Thus it’s not what they don’t know. It’s what they don’t know that they don’t know. Dumb people literally can’t imagine a higher intelligence than their own. Intelligent people can. It’s one of the biggest cleavage lines between being dumb and smart."
"This is evolutionarily adaptive. Not for the individual, god knows. But evolution doesn’t work at the individual level—it works at the gene pool level. And the gene pool has historically needed cannon fodder—strapping young braves willing and eager to go into battle in defense of their tribe. And they need a lot of confidence to do that as needed. Especially when the odds are dire."
"Climate science exacerbates this problem, because dumb people think in concrete, definite terms and categories, while climate is probabalistic, fuzzy, hard to grasp even for many with some technical training."
"An interesting corroboration of this foible of dump people is corporate self-assessment programs. I’ve heard that the worst, about-to-be-terminated employees usually give themselves glowing self-assessments, while the star employees are nearly always sober, downbeat in their self-assessment, with a keen sense of and concern for what they regard as their own shortcomings."
"A decade ago it was conceivable that an intelligent person could at least be a climate change skeptic. But in the early 2000s virtually all developed nations’ national science associations came out with climate change statements/warnings in line with what the climate science community says."
"Now, the only denialists left (including the many denialists masquerading as “skeptics”) are either dumb people who have been brainwashed by right wing propaganda; militant right wing ideologues whose emotions control their intellects; or those whose livelihood depends on being denialists."
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-laypersons-have-such-arrogance-when-denying-human-caused-climate-change
"One facet of low intelligence is lack of self-assessment ability. Thus it’s not what they don’t know. It’s what they don’t know that they don’t know. Dumb people literally can’t imagine a higher intelligence than their own. Intelligent people can. It’s one of the biggest cleavage lines between being dumb and smart."
"This is evolutionarily adaptive. Not for the individual, god knows. But evolution doesn’t work at the individual level—it works at the gene pool level. And the gene pool has historically needed cannon fodder—strapping young braves willing and eager to go into battle in defense of their tribe. And they need a lot of confidence to do that as needed. Especially when the odds are dire."
"Climate science exacerbates this problem, because dumb people think in concrete, definite terms and categories, while climate is probabalistic, fuzzy, hard to grasp even for many with some technical training."
"An interesting corroboration of this foible of dump people is corporate self-assessment programs. I’ve heard that the worst, about-to-be-terminated employees usually give themselves glowing self-assessments, while the star employees are nearly always sober, downbeat in their self-assessment, with a keen sense of and concern for what they regard as their own shortcomings."
"A decade ago it was conceivable that an intelligent person could at least be a climate change skeptic. But in the early 2000s virtually all developed nations’ national science associations came out with climate change statements/warnings in line with what the climate science community says."
"Now, the only denialists left (including the many denialists masquerading as “skeptics”) are either dumb people who have been brainwashed by right wing propaganda; militant right wing ideologues whose emotions control their intellects; or those whose livelihood depends on being denialists."
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-laypersons-have-such-arrogance-when-denying-human-caused-climate-change