The Dunning-Kruger Effect: A Psychological Condition For Our Time

(A faithful reader for suggested that I might find this to be an interesting topic.  I do.  Thanks, faithful reader!)
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Throughout history, it has been observed and remarked upon:

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
-- Confucius

The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himself to be a Foole.
-- Shakespeare

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
-- Bertrand Russell

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
-- Charles Bukowski

These learned individuals were definitely on to something.  They were describing, in their way, what's now a proven scientific fact, an acknowledged psychological condition known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect -- a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their abilities to be much higher than they really are.

In four studies beginning in 1999, Cornell University psychologists Dunning and Kruger researched a wide range of cognitive tasks performed by various groups of people.  They found that while competent groups estimated themselves fairly accurately, incompetent groups consistently over-estimated their abilities, e.g. "Those in the 12th percentile estimated themselves to be in the 62nd ."

In other words, the truly stupid are too stupid to know that they're stupid!

We all know people who exhibit the Dunning-Kruger Effect -- some from the workplace or other personal associations, some from the GOP presidential primaries, and sometimes we see them in the mirror.  Yikes!  Is that me?