If you’re like me, you hear the words coming out of the mouths of Tea Partiers, and you think, “you seem like a decent human being, so how on earth can you believe those things?” Of course, I don’t want to tar all self-identified tea partiers with the same brush–Gallup reports that in some basic respects they are demographically typical of the population. I’m just talking about the crazy conspiracy theory types.
Errol Morris, in the NYT, has written about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the notion that people who are incompetent lack the competence to realize that they are incompetent. According to Wikipedia:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the perverse situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”
Morris’s example was a hapless bank robber who robbed a series of banks in broad daylight with no attempt at disguise. The police aired the surveillance video on television and the robber was quickly apprehended. But he was genuinely surprised to have been caught, since he firmly believed–and claimed to have tested his belief beforehand–that by rubbing lemon juice all over his face, he would render himself invisible to cameras. “But I wore the juice,” he kept saying after his arrest.
Now, think about the “constitutional scholars” out there explaining in great detail why President Obama is ineligible to be President, or the “patriots” holding their “keep your government off my Medicare” signs, or the enraged constituents shouting down their representatives at town hall meetings last year. Doesn’t the Dunning-Kruger effect seem to describe them to a T?
TedF
that you are in fact more competent than the Tea Patiers and thus are able to identify their loonery whilst you look on with pity.
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p>Maybe the left is inflicted with this. While they march on to certain defeat in November, no doubt they’ll be yelling “but those guys are SOOO CRAZY!” the whole time.
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p>I’m not saying I believe either claim, but the problem with applying this effect to a political group is that political viewpoints are very subjective, while rubbing lemon juice on your face is universally recognized as not being a way to cloak one’s face from a camera.
Well, let me focus on some of the more outlandish legal claims the extreme Tea Partiers have made, since that is one area where I think that I have a basis for forming an “expert opinion” (even though I don’t practice law in any of these areas). Take the “birther” litigation, for example. All I can say is that when I’ve taken a look at some of this stuff, it appears so frivolous to me that I would doubt the credentials of any lawyer who argued otherwise, and every judge that has faced these issues has agreed with me. But if you read the birthers’ websites, which I don’t necessarily recommend, you’ll see that they see themselves as the true constitutional scholars whose final victory is near. Or take the idea of “citizens’ grand juries”, which have popped up various times since President Obama’s election. Again, I would question whether anyone claiming to be a lawyer who takes these seriously really is a lawyer, but you’d be shocked by the certitude of those who believe that they and their friends can get together for the specific purpose of bringing charges against the President or whomever and that they constitute a real grand jury.
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p>My point is that there are people out there on the far right who are saying dumb things and are–there’s no way to sugar-coat it–dumb enough themselves that they can’t see that what they’re saying is, well, dumb.
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p>I’m sure you could find people on the left and make the same point about them, although for the time being at least the right seems to have cornered the market on dumb in American politics. Here’s an example I just googled, for amusement value: an American study group dedicated to the principles of Juche, North Korea’s official ideology.
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p>TedF
Look at the rallies they have. Tons and tons of signs about being fed up with the fed, and a couple sprinkles of people who think obama is kenyan, or will at least act like it to piss you off đŸ˜‰
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p>I think conflating birthers with the tea party is wrong. The tea party formed way after birthers were around, and for totally different reasons. While the birthers probably self-identify as tea party members, they represent probably as much a proportion of the tea party as the larouchies have in the democratic party. All kinds of websites are all well and good, but websites don’t vote or show up at rallies.
First off I don’t believe Al-Qeada ever existed. Islam is the MIC’s Russia replacement enemy. I think it’s hilarious when corbettreport details just how many times the “numbered” set has been killed/captured. Or how the spin coming out of the war like AbuGrahb, the helicoptor video and the Puppy Chucking Marine always tarnish the image of America for the world press. The entire thing for me started with Larry Silverstein’s asbestos abatement solution after which the country went nuts.
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p>The “right” makes it a point to say to the military “Thank you for your service”. I on the other hand think service to whom, multi-nationals who attend Davos, the G20, Bilderberg, those billionaire/royalty boffins into Malthusian population reduction to ensure their place at the top of the food chain?
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p>With Bush at least we had that incompetence thing going for us. Obama however is far more unabashedly globo-corpo-techno-fascist on that highest spiritual plane of souless souls.
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p>It is an amazing fact that stupidity has allowed us to function for this long. Chaulk it up to flouridated water,3000 chemical additives and processed foods and the mind numbing social degradation celebrity set like the Kardashian brats or Paris Hilton.
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p>Yes it’s true, I can even anger the 911 truth crowd. Does that put me into the astroturfed right gatekeeper version of Tea Party. Surely my NSA guys would know if I was on my way to a rally.