Behavioral researchers at Brown University held a colloquium titled "Analytic thinking, bull—— receptivity, and fake news sensitivity." At an informal gathering afterwards, the conversation turned to the not-completely-unrelated topic of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Earlier that week, syndicated columnist George Will offered an amateur diagnosis of sorts. Will's assessment, based on Trump's off-base statements about the Civil War and other topics, was that the president suffers from a "dangerous disability" — not only because he's ignorant, and ignorant of his ignorance, but because he "does not know what it is to know something."
It turns out Will is on to something, and not just because a few academics agree with him. His observations about Trump may have prompted him to independently discover a kind of meta-incompetence known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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