Flutterby™! : Pondering 2011-12-05 20:38:01.647868+00

Pondering

2011-12-05 20:38:01.647868+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Thought of the moment: Libertarian tendencies as an expression of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

#Comment Re: made: 2011-12-06 16:39:08.275895+00 by: Jack William Bell

I think the same could be said for extreme positions on any side: Progressive, Marxist, Conservative...

If someone tells you they know the solution to any fiscal or social problem, you are most likely talking to an idiot who doesn't know how much they don't know.

I was actually thinking about it positively: That many (young) libertarians really do have skills, but because they're struggling socially also think that everyone else has more skills. Therefore the people who aren't wildly successful must be slackers.

#Comment Re: made: 2011-12-06 18:14:15.80612+00 by: Jack William Bell

Hmm... I feel like there's a problem with that, but I can't put my finger on it. So, in a conscious attempt to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect myself, I'll simply accept it as a valid thesis and cogitate on ways to test the theory.

#Comment I was wrong and so are you made: 2011-12-07 18:35:00.756621+00 by: crasch

Oooh, cool! Yeah, I have recently become more and more aware of how we cast the facts we receive into our own mythologies, and those that don't fit get abandoned.

But more particularly, I'm thinking back to what it was like to me to be a young libertarian. Radically so. And one who didn't "get" the whole social thing. And how I couldn't understand how everyone else who did couldn't seem to get off their butts and make something of themselves, how they couldn't take steps to better themselves.

Nowadays I understand that there are a whole bunch of people out there who had upbringings that didn't prepare them at all for the world, and that our best chance at economic success is to work to educate them rather than writing them off. But at the time I thought it was a matter of "I'm struggling much harder than these other people and I'm making it, why can't they?"

I really recommend Duncan Watts' book Everything is Obvious

- some stuff in there related to this discussion. Very thought-provoking.