The day after any major news story, half the people you know become experts. An economic crisis produces armies of amateur economists. A health crisis produces epidemiologists on every street corner. A football manager gets sacked and suddenly twelve million people could have done it better.
This is not stupidity. It is a feature of how human cognition works.
The Dunning-Kruger effect
In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a paper showing that people with limited knowledge of a subject tend to overestimate their competence, while genuine experts tend to underestimate theirs. It is a real and well-replicated finding, though it is often over-simplified in popular culture.
The core insight: not knowing enough to know what you do not know produces confidence. Learning more produces awareness of complexity, which produces doubt. Real expertise brings measured confidence back, but it is tempered by knowing the limits of the field.
Why it is everywhere now
Social media rewards confident takes over uncertain ones. A tweet that says "this situation is complex and I am not sure" gets fewer engagements than one that says "here is exactly what is happening and why". The algorithm does not distinguish between expert and amateur confidence.
The result is a world full of very confident, very wrong commentary that looks identical in format to careful, informed analysis.
The cure
The people least susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger trap are those who have a clear map of their own knowledge — who know what they know, what they have heard about, and what they are genuinely ignorant of. Intellectual honesty is not humility as a personality trait; it is a skill.
