I'm pretty sure you guys have come across the kind of people in your life who are so damn ignorant that they overestimate their own abilities and claim to know everything, even if their actual intelligence is equal to that of a fish.

You might even be thinking of someone like that right now and wondering why these people are the way they are. Why do they think of their abilities as superior to others even though they clearly don't know jack shit about what's being discussed?

But even though it is really easy to group some people in this category because of something irrational they did in the past, we often forget that we too might be a part of this very group without actually realizing it. Why, you ask? Well, because...

We Are All Dumber Than We Think We Are

We humans, to some degree, are all really really dumb even if we don't like to admit it most of the times. We all like to believe that we are in some way or the other, above average and better than the majority. Ironically, that itself makes us, you guessed it, average.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect helps us understand why stupid people, or people with less or no knowledge, are actually way more confident about their (non-existing) skills and abilities than the more experienced ones.

It's important to know that this does not reflect people's ego, but their incompetence and lack of ability to understand their own ignorance. In simple words, people do actually admit their own faults and weaknesses, but only when they can spot them.

You can't make a person question their abilities if they don't see any flaw in their abilities themselves in the first place. For them to gain perspective, their abilities have to be challenged first so they can realize of how dumb they actually are when they fail in that given situation.

This isn't something you should feel bad about though. Failing is a part of learning and the only way we can make people and ourselves better and more knowledgeable is by first admitting of how wrong and naive we were.

Admitting you were wrong is the first step to being right, just like how admitting you are indeed dumb, is the first step to being smart. The more you know, the more you realize of how much more there is to know.

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