Evolution sometimes happens in plain sight

I was reading a blog post yesterday that mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect, which boils down to: Those who are incompetent also cannot accurately self-assess their competence. 

As David Dunning wrote: “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

Trying to sum up behaviors with one "effect" is never totally accurate, but the D-K effect goes a long way in explaining rising hospitalization rates and stagnant vaccination rates and a significant portion of the population putting themselves in harm's way of the virus (the willfully unvaccinated).

The same D-K effect helps us understand why Americans seem so negative about the economy right now, despite the "facts" being that unemployment is dropping, that gas prices are related to world-wide events, and that several large federal bills have either passed or will soon be... and they will provide all sorts of needed benefits.

BTW, when asked, most Americans seem to favor the various programs the infrastructure and "build back better" bills contain. 

This paradox seems related to not being able to recognize what you don't understand, which I think of as willful ignorance. But if you are an incompetent thinker and citizen, the word "willful" may not be accurate.

A simple example of incompetence and ignorance has to be in the common writing errors people tend to make. Most people don't intend to use the wrong form of "you're," (almost always choosing "your") but if you can't recognize the usage error, nothing changes. 

Built-in spell- and grammar-check software should be at least a partial fix for this lack of competence -- after all, the word or phrase is underlined right on the screen. Just right click to find options. Yet spelling and grammar are not much better today than they were decades ago, prior to word processing.

I have spent decades pointing out these sorts of errors to students but clearly have not found some secret to overcoming this incompetence with the English language.

No one seems to know how to create a work-around to change perceptions among an incompetent citizenry, but it will be interesting to see what rhetorical strategies the Democratic Party develops in the next few months to shift attitudes.

As always, the media must be considered, since they are still gatekeepers of information. I saw that the backlog of shipping containers in California was down 39 percent from the peak chaos, but nothing has surfaced on that in the papers I read daily.

Yesterday we learned that employment rates were much better in the late summer than the big headlines proclaimed, and those headlines must have something to do with the general feeling of frustration many Americans are feeling.

Or maybe we just need to hang in there, hope that gas prices come down a little, and that all that money people are spending on goods (not services) will eventually dry up. After all, how many new freezers will each family need to purchase?

Or, in the case of the virus, we can wait patiently for the incompetent, the stupid, and the fanatical, to die off or give in to outside pressure.

What would Darwin do?