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Those who are familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

...will appreciate this latest installment from Dunning:
We Are All Confident Idiots

 

I can see the lecture now :rolleyes: ...



I wish I was there to see how the following turned out :eek:...

 

Saw this one from Ian Bremmer doing the rounds on Twitter this morning:

 

Here is a summary from Steve Novella:
Lessons from Dunning-Kruger

 

From John Cleese:

 

Or to put it the way I always said to my grad students when I asked them the question: "What is an expert"?

After they flounder and generally buggarised about with pompous answers, I use to say: "and expert is someone that knows that they don't know".

Typically, a PhD student will set of to find out a huge amount about a very small matter - more and more about less and less; thus logically ending up knowing everything about nothing.

Actually, most of us would state the opposite. We found out that we did not know, and ended up knowing less and less about more and more, until eventually we knew nothing about everything.

 

It used to be easy to tell who the expert was ... they were the ones from 'out of town' who walked around at conferences with a box of slides under their arms. Now they have USB sticks in their pockets, so they are harder to recognize!