Saturday, November 4, 2017

What is a "Dunning-Kruger conservative"?

As I define it here, a "Dunning-Kruger conservative" (abbreviated "DKC") is a right-wing commentator/blogger/troll/whatever who acts like they know almost everything about an issue, and their position is unassailable, when in fact they barely know anything about that issue, and it is not difficult for most people to demonstrate why they are wrong. The term is named after the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people who are bad at something tend to think they are much better at it than they really are (Dunning & Kruger 1999).

Examples of DKCs are prevalent online, and are easily identified by people who speak loudly and confidently while embarrassing themselves by being wrong about almost everything they say. For example, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, and Paul Joseph Watson all fit the definition very well.

Their arguments can take many forms, one of which is easily identified by the word "basic" or other synonyms--e.g. "Ben Shapiro DEBUNKS 'White Privilege' myths using basic statistics", claiming that liberals ignore or deny "basic biology", Milo Yiannopoulos ostensibly debunking BLM with basic statistics, etc. What these arguments purport to say is that not only are SJWs wrong, but also their wrongness can be understood very easily by anyone who knows even the most basic aspects of the issue under discussion. What they actually reveal, however, is that those who understand only very superficial aspects of an issue (e.g. the existence of XX and XY sex chromosome pairs) tend not to understand other, more complex aspects of it (e.g. the evidence that gender identity has a biological basis).