Tom Harris ——Bio and Archives--December 4, 2025

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“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”-- So said the character Touchstone, the court jester, in Shakespeare’s comedic play As You Like It.

If England’s greatest poet and dramatist were still alive, he would point out the strange situation we find ourselves in today, namely that the people who know the least about many topics are often the most vocal in supporting their causes. For example, in the climate change debate, activists claim with self-righteous certainty that we are causing a climate emergency due to our emissions of carbon dioxide, and that vast changes in our society are needed to avert catastrophe. Yet experts aren’t nearly as confident. Although the media and world leaders tell us that the science is settled, a deeper dive into the issue reveals that it isn’t as clear cut as they make it out to be.

This is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that makes us more likely to overestimate our abilities when our skills or knowledge aren’t adequate and to underestimate our abilities when we have greater developed skills or knowledge. A cognitive bias is an error in our thinking that affects how we perceive others, ourselves, or the world and influences how we make decisions. This can lead to irrational judgements and beliefs of certainty despite lack of credible evidence. In addition to the Dunning-Kruger effect, some other cognitive biases are the confirmation bias (interpreting new information as confirmation of your pre-existing beliefs), self-serving bias (the tendency to take personal responsibility for positive outcomes and blame external factors for negative outcomes), and availability bias (thinking that things that readily come to mind are more common than is actually the case).

In the seminal paper by Kruger and Dunning (1999), “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments,” they found that we often........

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