Knowledge
A person’s knowledge is the inside of a sphere. What they does not know is the outside. The surface of the sphere is the border between what the person knows and what they do not know. If someone has a little knowledge, also the surface of the sphere is small, thus it seems to the person that the unknown is small (as the unknown can be contacted by the surface), and thus they think that they know almost everything. For those with big knowledge, the border area is also big and they are aware of the immense space they do not know.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger Effect "is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of a task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge." (from Wikipedia). It is frequently illustrated by a competence/confidence curve, as below. But I have added some important information to that curve: the point where you start and stop publishing guides and tutorial on the Internet. But why in the heck do you forget deleting the old ones?
Being long time on the Mount Stupid obviously prevents you from progressing in you skills and competence. I think,
the simplest and most effective solution to avoid this trap, is to take part in different competitions in your new area of interest (if possible). Comparing your performance with others will give you a good feedback and enable you to progress.
The Power of Internet
You may think that nowadays using the Internet to find the answers is common. Unfortunately it is not the case, or rather it is only partially the case. If the question is "how can I change oil in car X?", then everyone will look for it on the Internet. But interestingly if the question is somehow connected with human behavior, only the persons with big knowledge sphere are aware that they may not know everything. For example, for a question "Should helmets be compulsory for cyclists, given that in a case of head collision they increase the survival chance over 20 times?" people with small knowledge tend to answer "yes". People with big knowledge are aware that the answer is probably more complex as there are many other aspects, which are (deliberately) omitted in this question and instead of guessing, they would better search the Internet. And yes, in this particular case, it turns out that in each country that introduced compulsory helmets for cyclists, the number of accidents, including deadly ones increased. Why? Because it is a more complex issue and although the helmet protects the head very well, the other aspects tipped the scale. If you want to know the details, just search the Internet. So why did any country introduce the same law that had already been proved to be harmful in other countries? That is because unfortunately also many members of parliament... (How the hell was it possible that they were elected?!?!?)
The Power of Elementary Education
In Poland currently the men with elementary education live on average 68 years while men with university degree live on average 80 years. Of course not every correlation means causation. For example, there is more crime in cities with more churches. This is correlation, but this is not causation: the crime does not cause that more churches are being built (though it should, as it is written in Mark 2:17 "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.") and the churches do not cause more crime. Simply both correlate with the city size and the city size is the causation of both. It is very popular to use the correlations, which are not causations to manipulate people so that they think they are causations. But in this case, after a more in depth analysis of the habits of people with different education level it is really reasonable to say that education is the cause of better health and thus of longer life. So what is the conclusion? The conclusion seems obvious: the best investment in public health is the investment in schools, not in hospitals. In universities? Rather not. Rather in elementary schools, as the elementary school has the strongest impact on the future educational choices and on all life choices in general. Good universities will not help if many persons will be devastated by the elementary schools, as they will never choose to go to an university.
Creative Commons License. You are free to copy, share and adapt all articles and software from my web page, provided that you attribute the work to me and place a link to my home page. What you build upon my works may be distributed only under the same or similar license and you may not distort the meaning of my original texts. Miroslaw Kordos