We are a democracy, despite the armchair experts’ claims |
It's been a while since I've talked about cognitive biases. Considering that Monday is Memorial Day and we have people going around claiming the United States, for which military members and others have fought and died, is not a democracy, perhaps it's time I talked about the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified the bias in 1999; it's the tendency of people with low ability in specific areas to overestimate their knowledge. We saw that during the pandemic with all the armchair epidemiologists (many of whom died) who decided they knew better than doctors of virology and epidemiology, all because they were seeing the scientific process in real time and they didn't understand that even dealing with a novel virus involves trial and error.
We're seeing it again now with a whole phalanx of constitutional "experts" who are anything but weighing in on gerrymandering (sorry, but as history and my high school civics teacher taught, it's wrong for any reason), emoluments, executive power and a lot of other issues they can't admit they're not knowledgeable about because 'Murica, by God!
So let's tackle the whole democracy thing. It happens on the Voices page, on social media and just about anywhere you can think of: Someone says our nation is a democracy, and someone else yells back that it's a republic. A lot of that, I believe, has to do with........