The next time you sit down to read the business section of the paper or watch one of the business shows consider this –
“The more people believed they knew about finances in general, the more likely they were to overclaim knowledge of the fictitious financial terms.
The same pattern emerged for other domains, including biology, literature, philosophy, and geography.
For instance, people’s assessment of how much they know about a particular biological term will depend in part on how much they think they know about biology in general.”
More here – PsyBlog
This in many ways is simply an adjunct to the work done on experts and their predictive ability by Philip Tetlock which I have written about before. See here, here, here and here.
Too few adopt Goethe’s maxim – Doubt grows with knowledge
