Dunning-Kruger

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for others.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Dunning-Kruger syndrome has been understood largely as a workplace phenomenon, but let me posit that it is a powerful factor in politics:

Incompetent, low-value people constantly imagine themselves to be smarter than they are, and smarter than other people generally, and believe that other people require their (incompetent) guidance in a nearly limitless number of lifestyle choices.

"I am the one people have been waiting for"

In fact, the people who assert that they are smarter than others, and thus must lend their competency and intellect to others, are in fact among the stupidest, most incompetent, and least useful people in existence.


Conversely,

An expert is someone who gets called upon to offer his expertise. He is usually a highly paid person. His consultancy is highly sought-after.



If you are the sort of person who believes she has an "expertise" in an area, but, strangely enough, finds themself always having to force this expertise upon other people, rather than being approached by them for it: You are almost certainly an incompetent, useless, stupid person, who has very little actual value, but whose value has been inflated and overestimated by your own poorly-informed, low-competency ego.

Thus, even your estimation of self is, as is all other things about you, incompetent.

The Idiot and the Expert have one thing in common: They both have lots and lots of opinions.

The easiest way to tell the Idiot from the Expert -- you don't even bother to have to listen to their opinions this way -- is to determine if anyone is seeking those opinions out, or if that person is contriving new ways to inflict those opinions upon unwilling strangers.

If you're pushing your unsolicited opinions on strangers, and have to resort to the tools of coercion to make yourself heard: Guess what, Idiot?