We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
Memorizing data doesn’t make one smarter… but learning concepts absolutely does.
The classic, “we’ll never need this in adult life” is math like Pythagoras’ theorem, or factoring binomial equations (remember FOIL?). We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life… we learn that math so that grown ass adults don’t think someone using algebra is performing black magic.
Seems silly… but it’s just like how many folks never learned past middle school biology and now think XX&XY are the only chromosomal possibilities.
How about we meet in the middle and say “learning the concept that you might be wrong will help your intelligence”?
My mother who “allegedly” graduated high school has more confidence than anyone I know and will say things like “you can’t divide a small number by a bigger number” or “temperatures don’t have decimals, only full numbers”. Then as you stare at her blankly trying to figure out if she’s joking or not, she’ll tell you you’re clearly not very smart if you don’t know that
IMO you’re just describing a closed mind versus an open mind. Learning the concept that you might be wrong is fundamental to having an open mind.
And it’s difficult if not impossible to be more intelligent with a closed mind no?
(not the op) but yeah, I agree with that.
That said, with the example of your mom, it sounds like it could be insecurity as much as it could be a closed mind. Some people really struggle with the idea that others might think they’re dumb, especially their children. So they assert things as fact, because they want to maintain the image that they have all the answers. Especially when kids are bright, some parents will fight tooth and nail to maintain an air of intellectual superiority, to assert intellectual dominance.
It may seem sad, but it’s pretty understandable, relatable even. - Humans be like that.
I think that kind of thing is more cultural than anything. Probably she doesn’t care very much whether it’s actually true or not, and feels she’d be losing face by being anything but confident about it.
Imo it’s more important that people learn that being wrong can be empowering, and how to have conversations where someone is wrong but not being put down for it, than just learning that they can be wrong.
Very possible. I just couldn’t see myself purposely saying something I didn’t think was true and then doubling up with calling the other person dumb over it. I don’t agree with almost anything she does though so that checks out.
Funny enough, it was an agricultural class where the utility of the quadratic equation hit me. Professor didn’t even call it that, but we used it to calculate maximum efficiency in fertilizer spread.
o shit. Im gonna be expanding my garden next year. Didn’t know Id need my math text book haha
Students asking “why do we need to learn this” or worse graduates who proudly proclaim “Day 19,337 of never using the quadratic equation” are a symptom of teachers who haven’t read their Thorndike.
Learning is an active process. It takes effort to do. People do not like being made to waste effort. Students will be much more effective learners when they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “You never know when this will come in handy” is not good enough. This is Thorndike’s principle of readiness. And especially high school teachers are bad at satisfying it.
Math teachers get it very often, because for some reason we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians. Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples and teach math as a series of rules to be applied to contextless problems, and to the student it feels like years of pointless busywork.
And while I can’t claim to have ever factored a polynomial in my daily life since leaving school, I did recently come up against the order of operations. I calculated the width of some cabinet doors, and I factored in the gaps between them wrong. 3 doors, 4 gaps between the doors. I did door_width = opening_width / 3 - 4 * gap_width. When I needed to do door_width = (opening_width - 4 * gap_width) / 3. In the first case, you end up subtracting all 4 gap widths from each door. I would be better at math today if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12.
I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.
When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it’s what schools are highly geared toward doing.
An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that “convective” means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word “convective” it’s basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You’ve probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:
Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?
A. Upslope Fog
B. Thunderstorms
C. Stratus Clouds
Okay, what should a pilot do about thunderstorms? Are they bad? What about a thunderstorm is bad? A student who can answer those questions, who can explain that thunderstorms contain strong turbulence and winds that can break the airplane or throw it out of control have reached the Understanding level.
Problem: Sitting in the classroom talking about something is NOT flying a plane. I’ve had students who can explain why thunderstorms are dangerous fly right toward an anvil-shaped cloud without a care in the world, because they didn’t recognize a thunderstorm when they saw one. Living in a forest, people around here don’t get a good look at them from the side; the sky just turns grey and it rains a lot and there’s bright flashes and booming noises. If you can get a good look at one, it’s a tremendously tall cloud that flattens out way up high and tends to have a bit that sticks out like the horn on an anvil. Even in the clear air under that horn you’ll get severe turbulence. A student that can identify a thunderstorm and steers to avoid it can Apply their knowledge, and have thus reached the Application level.
It’s a sign that you’re ready for your checkride if, upon getting a weather briefing that includes convective activity, the student makes wise command decisions to either reschedule the flight for a day of safer weather, or for isolated storms plots a route that steers to the safe side of the weather and plans for contingencies such as turning back or diverting to alternates. A student that alters his navigational choices based on weather forecasts has reached the correlation level.
It’s difficult to go beyond the understanding level in a classroom with textbooks and paper tests, which is too much of what K-12 and college is like.
Love this comment. If anyone knows anything about machine learning or brains, this resembles modal limitations in learning.
A lot of our intelligence is shaped around our sensory experience, because we build tools for thinking via the tools we’ve already built, ever since baby motorbabbling to figure how our limbs work. Why Hellen Keller had such trouble learning, but once she got an interface she could engage with for communication, things took off.
We always use different tools, but some people don’t see colour. This doesn’t mean they are stupid when they answer differently in describing a rainbow.
Also why llms struggle with visual/physical concepts if the logic requires information that doesn’t translate through text well. Etc.
Point being, on top of how shitty memorization is as the be all end all, learning and properly framing issues will have similar blindspots like not recognizing the anvil cloud.
This is also why people in informational bubbles can confirm their own model from ‘learning’ over people’s lives experiences.
Like most issues, it doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but epistemic humility is important, and it is important not to ignore the possibility of blindspots, even when confidence is high.
Always in context of the robustness of the framing around it, with the same rules applied at that level. Why “nothing about us without us” is important.
But also we gotta stop people giving high confidence to high dissonance problems, and socializing it into law. We should be past the “mmr causes autism” debate by now, but I’m hearing it from the head of health in the USA.
Ok, but you never finished the example with the child, parrot and barbie dolls. What is the punchline there?
Children can be taught to repeat something even if they don’t understand it. So can many species of parrot, they famously mimic sounds they hear including human speech without understanding the meaning behind the sounds. And I seem to remember a model of Barbie doll that had a little sound recorder built in so she can “really talk.” These things can repeat something they’ve "learned’ without any deeper understanding.
Education, done correctly, doesn’t teach you what to think but how to think.
Expanding on this, it shows you some basic options/pathways on how to think.
For me it was more like learning how other people think. Like, I took an accounting class as an elective and while it didn’t make me an accountant but it helped me understand accountants.
I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.
I don’t think it’s related to patterns, it’s the methodology.
Sure, there’s some groundwork that needs to be memorized in different fields, but this is like learning your first words. These are necessary so that we can communicate with each other, and they serve as building blocks upon all rest is built upon.
Everything else we are mostly taught by learning how some old guy came up with an answer, making clever use of the tools that we also have.
After a while it sort of clicks that there’s a method to the madness, you build up and up until you get to the moon, and you get this feeling that anything can be explained logically - we might not know how yet, but surely it will be at some point.
Unless it’s quantum physics, fuck that.
It feels like there’s a lot of people who skipped these building steps, maybe they were just memorizing stuff to get by the exams without exercising their brains on the methods to reach those solutions, or were simply never taught, and now they just don’t have the tools to make sense of what’s around them, and will blindly follow a monster that assures them that they’ll be ok as long as they do this or that…
So here’s how I liken education. I’ve been an instructor at the Naval Engineering School so have a bit of experience in the subject.
First thing to learn is “facts” by rote memorization and then parrot it back. If you can do that you have learned something which is not unimportant and is an important base for the next step.
Then you learn how to apply those facts to help you in a specific set of situations. This is a very small hop above the previous step, but an important one, as now you know how to solve a narrow set of problems in a specific set of circumstances.
Unfortunately, this is where a lot of education ends because this is the easiest level to test. To go beyond this, you as an instructor must inspire the students.
The third level is when you take the facts you know and the situations to apply them and start modifying them to fit new novel situations. This now requires active thinking on the part of the student and will likely result in a lot of mistakes and suffering but this is where the instructor can gently guide them along and nurture their curiosity and keep their spirits up when they fail.
Next level is an important one, when the student starts to ask, “why does this work this way in this situation and this way in this situation”? That is the start of true wisdom.
And the final level of education is when you go back and try to teach the subject. That is when you truly open yourself up to learning.
Depth of Knowledge levels aren’t meant to be progressed through linearly, but a way to assess tasks. One student’s mind might turn on at level three, but not at level one. Another might crumble at level 3 even if they’ve performed level 1 and 2 exceptionally.
That first student will, having been inspired by the nature of the question, go back and learn the basics. They need to be given material that supports that activity. The second student needs to know how to chunk and connect their previous tasks to the new one.
Great educators can personalize this work for each student and meet them where they are at. They can leverage technologies to do so and express sincere belief in students in a way no technology can.
- A peeve of mine is the ease at which they’ve correctly diagnosed the Dunning-Kuerger effect and liberally applied. Few, if any, recognize that there is controversy around the effect.
- I think your insight is part of a growth mindset. A concept championed by Carol Dweck, it has been embraced by educators and, unfortunately, abused by managers. Too many people think a growth mindset is better than a fixed mindset.
- Intelligence has many definitions and contexts. I agree that intellectual humility is a useful trait and makes people far more bearable to deal with, but there’s a lot of ways to examine what intelligence is and how it operates
People in this thread have a hard time understanding what intelligence denotes.
Hint: it’s not success or being smart.
Yet again, we have difficulty having shared definitions of the most basic words.
We really need to address this some day. So much conflict will go away once we stop arguing about the definitions of words.
Maybe words are too imprecise, and we need something else. But on the other hand, we have precise words for lots of things. But it’s considered elitist or whatever to use them. “$10 words” are often just very precise and replace a bunch of other words in a sentence.
Without both perfect symbols and perfectly understanding wielders of those symbols, there is no such thing as perfect communication.
To me, this unfortunately means that your dream will forever remain a dream because there is no such thing as perfection in any field. People will always make associations with words that were not initially intended to be made with those words, meaning that, even if we correctly define something and generally agree on that definition, through culture and more specific types of interaction with symbolic phenomenon, those true meanings will all always be open to alteration and redefinition. Making words more precise does not change the user-end of this phenomenon, meaning that no amount of accuracy will be enough to correct for human blunder and ignorance. I dont think there is a proper way to fix this problem :(
I know. 😔
I mostly share these feelings because it illuminates the issue a bit for some people who otherwise have not considered it.
Definition of smart
Cambridge:
intelligent, or able to think quickly or intelligently in difficult situations:
Mirriam-Webster:
1: having or showing a high degree of mental ability : intelligent, bright
Oxford:
intelligent
Could you share your definition that somehow contradicts all the major dictionaries?
Nah that’s about it, what’s your worry?
How are being smart and being intelligent not synonyms?
To be smart you need to be intelligent, but being intelligent doesn’t mean you’re smart.
It has a broader definition.
Memorization have importance. We, as a species, are as intelligent as primitive cavemen. Our brains haven’t changed that much since those times.
What allows us to be different, to have a prosper civilization, is the information we have stored. Much of that information is stored in our brains.
Critical thinking is of great importance. Of course. But let’s not dismiss the ability to store that critical information.
A healthy level of skepticism, both of other people’s ideas and of one’s own, is a sign of great intelligence.
Unfortunately this also gets abused by some people who believe they have a healthy level of skepticism, but actually are way off the deep end. Like anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and other anti-science people.
So “healthy” in this context shouldn’t be defined by the individual.
It’s good to be skeptical about vaccines or a round earth. Then you investigate and find out that vaccines work and the earth is a pseudosphere.
Skeptical doesn’t have to mean that you straight up deny everything. It only means that you do not blindly believe it. That’s how science is actually suppose to mean. The best way to prove a scientific theory is trying to disprove it as hard as you can.
You and I are on the same page. My only point was that there are unfortunately many people out there now who believe they have a “healthy” level of skepticism, but are actually misled, misinformed, and not educated enough to distinguish reality. And I named specific groups who frequently fit this pattern.
When skepticism is truly healthy, it’s great. But there are many people who are unable to identify what “healthy” means here. No where did I say or mean to imply that some skepticism is a bad thing.
Skepticism doesn’t necessarily entail outright rejection of something. Like, I could be skeptical about vaccines and their side effects, but still get the vaccine because it is the best option available to me right now.
There’s a lot of different things that get pumped into “intelligence”. There’s “reasoning ability”, “knowledge”, “wisdom”, and a whole host of others, some in the category of traditional intelligence, and others around things like emotional intelligence.
Raw knowledge is something that schools can teach through memorization. You have facts. Memorization isn’t the best way to do it, since context and such can often make information stick better, but some things you’re eventually going to memorize, intentionally or not (I don’t calculate 6*6=36 every time).
Reasoning or analytical ability is much harder to teach, since you can’t really make someone more able to have insights and such.
Wisdom is something that can be trained I’d phrase it. I don’t think you can be taught it like you can a history lesson, but it needs to be trained like a sport. How to apply reason to a situation, how the knowledge you have relates to things and other bits of knowledge. Which things are important and which aren’t.
It sounds like you’re mostly taking what I’ve called wisdom, with a dash if introspection tossed in, which can play very well with wisdom. “How sure am I about this?” Is a question wisdom might make you ask , and you need to know yourself to know the answer.
Knowing how to question the right part of something, so that you’re not getting caught up in the little inconsistencies and missing the big one, or considering the wrong facts that are unimportant to a situation.
(A pet peeve of mine) Sometimes people will bring up statistics of race in relation to crime. People with perfectly good reasoning ability and knowledge will get caught up debating the veracity of the statistics, or the minutiae of the implications of how other statistics interplay to lead to those numbers, both in an attempt to deny the conclusion of the original argument.
The more wise thing to do is to question why this person is making the argument in the first place. Use your knowledge of society to know there are racists who want to convince others. Your reasoning to know that someone more interested in persuasion than truth can twist numbers how they want. Reject their position entirely, instead of accepting their position as valid and arguing their facts.No, education gives you a good faith foundation so your neural connections are well groomed and not messy. Arguing in good faith is the basis for what we consider a fact is, and our sciences and legal systems. It’s the basis of progress. It also stops you from being bamboozled, even by yourself, and prevents delusional thinking.
And in terms of IQ, yes, remembering facts DOES make an IQ score go up significantly.
Curiosity and openmindedness are related to intelligence, along with resiliency.
Is the Dunning-Krugger effect mainly displayed by low education people?
In my own personal experience pretty much everybody displays that in areas outside their expertise, and I definitely include myself in this.
For example the phenomenon of people offering what basically amounts to Medical advice is incredibly common outside the Medical profession - pretty much every-fucking-body will offer you some suggestion if you say you’re feeling like you have a bit of a temperature or something generic like that.
It’s also my experience that highly educated people don’t have any greater introspection abilities than the rest (i.e. for self-analysis and self-criticism) or empathy (to spot when other people feel that you’re talking of your ass).
Maybe it’s the environment I grew in, or the degrees I learned and professional occupations I had (so, Physics, Electronics Engineering, Software Engineering) that are too limited to make a judgement, maybe it’s me showing my own Dunning-Kruger effect or maybe my observations are actually representative and reasonably correct: whichever way, my 2c is that learned people are no better at the adult mature skills (such as introspection and empathy) than the rest, something which also matches with my experience that the Education System (at least were I studied, Portugal of the 80s and 90s) doesn’t at all teach those personal skills.
So IMHO, your assumption that the majority of those people have low education is probably incorrect, unless you’re anchoring that on the statistic that most human beings on Planet Earth have low education, in which case they’re certainly the majority of the confidently incorrect even if they’re no more likely to be so than the rest simply because there’s more of them than of the rest.
PS: Also note that amongst highly educated people there are people from different areas which emphasize different modes of thinking. My impression is that whilst STEM areas tend to emphasize analytical thinking, objectivity, assumption validation and precision, other areas actually require people to in many ways have a different relationship with objective reality (basically anything in which you’re supposed to persuade others).
different relationship with objective reality
That’s a very diplomatic way to describe politicians and business professionals
There was a popular author of technical books about the Commodore 64 who thought nuclear bombs aren’t real.
You can have a few neurons really good at one thing, they don’t map over to other things.
I could be wrong though
Lol
Memorization is such a strange thing to try to teach. I was never good at that in school but could sing any song on the radio after hearing it once. In school I was good enough at math up to a point because I was so bad at memorization got good at thinking my way through it. Was much better at word problems than equations in elementary school.
I do agree with the premise of the shower thought - part of being educated is learning through mistakes. Making mistakes is one of the fastest ways to learn something, and is the main reason I’m good at my job. I am happy to work in accounting where mistakes don’t kill anyone.
