I don’t know, neither do you
This is my dated COVID text as well as my timeless text about ignorance, arrogance, and the Dunning-Kruger effect. By now, you’ve became jaded, annoyed, or otherwise exhausted by everything COVID. Maybe you’re pissed off by the restrictions, passports, and other types of infringements on your freedoms for the sake of a marginally safer and therefore dramatically more controlled world, or maybe you’re losing your mind because of the selfish and gullible imbeciles who won’t do the responsible and scientifically sound act of getting vaccinated and contributing to the greater good while we try to survive the pandemic with the least amount of casualties.
And if you’re reading this years from now, you might know what actually happened, who was right, and who was wrong — or perhaps you’ve forgotten almost everything about it because it’s barely a footnote in the chaos of the 2020’s. Or maybe the whole corona thing is just another news item among things like celebrity gossip, the massive fires around the globe, new diets, the next three World Wars, the umpteenth iterations of smartphones, and social justice riots.
My point is, at the time of this writing, we’re dealing with a lot of new information in the middle of a lot more new information. COVID hit us two years ago with a new variant changing the game every few months. We got the vaccines a year ago, making them a research vaccine for many more years to come. There’s misinformation, disinformation, piss information, and suppression of information. We’re a species of about eight billion very different people, each of us with their very own strengths and weaknesses based on all kinds of backgrounds and life style choices. It all adds up to a complex system of complex systems none of us can handle.
Also, we can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel only a fraction of all the things out there to be sensed, and we’re incapable of holding all that information in our head, let alone comprehend it all. Our brain simplifies everything down to something more palatable — so much so that we don’t even see colors as they are but the way that seems most real to us.
Add to that the innumerable biases we have, keeping us satisfied with our choices. We have severe cognitive biases to keep believing we have the answer even when undeniable proof of the opposite is hammering our head in. We’re biased toward group think so we wouldn’t be cast aside. We’re biased toward incremental changes, if any, because large scale change would jeopardise our entire identity and being. We’re confirmation biased.
My point is, we know almost nothing about anything, and that little is greatly distorted by our failing senses and lacking brain capacity. We’re blind to even our blindness. We don’t know what we don’t know, yet we think we do, based on whatever faulty evidence we think we have, all adding up to the Dunning-Kruger effect where the most ignorant might know they’re ignorant but the ones who know little think they know everything while the informed second-guess whatever they do know.
My point is, stop telling people how things are. It’s a feeble opinion at the very best. Instead, do your best to listen to the people who think differently, because they just might know something you need to learn.
My point is, instead of proving how we were right all along, let’s try to be a little less wrong each day.
