Who amongst us is able to differentiate between what they know and what they do not? The answer is no one; the American author William Feather wrote that being educated is knowing the difference. The author of “We Are All Confident Idiots,” (Oct. 27th, 2014) David Dunning writes in his piece in the Pacific Standard magazine that we all share in the ignorance of our own idiocies. As a researcher at Cornell University, Dunning explores the contributions and reasonings of why we are so susceptible to this process in our evaluation and regulation of our knowledge, reasoning, and learning; otherwise known as the study of metacognition. Throughout the piece Dunning wishes to inform us as to avoid “situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous— especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive…show more content… They presented people with several variations of a curved-tube image and asked participants to predict the trajectory. It often became indistinguishable which of the participants were 100% correct and completely wrong because both groups exhibited the same amount of confidence. Dunning previously states that this incompetence leads to the inappropriate confidence displayed. These are the facts and statistics demonstrated, along with the cause being that each group had reasoning for why they were correct, thus the effect was another instance of misconception, but not from misinformation. Rather “cradle-born errors— in which humans frequently generate misbeliefs: We import knowledge from appropriate settings into ones where it is
