I’m sure we have all been there. It’s that moment online (probably during a polite exchange of views regarding climate change) when your opponent responds to your most recent post with, “Lol, that’s pure Dunning-Kruger!”

There is a remote possibility that this is new to you, so I will explain. Dunning and Kruger were the two psychologists who won the Ig Nobel prize for writing a paper titled, “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments”. The problem is pithily summarised by David Dunning: “The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning–Kruger club.”

As such, the Dunning-Kruger jibe is a pretentious reference used to imply that you are just too thick to understand that you are just too thick. Worse still, your stupidity is to be contrasted with the wisdom of the chap who was clever enough to have come across the Dunning-Kruger effect and then recognised its applicability in your case. You are meant to consider yourself defeated by the better man.

Indeed, if you are in the least bit sceptical regarding climate change, the assumption that you are one of the Dunning-Kruger knuckle-draggers will be treated as axiomatic. As Google Gemini puts it:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is frequently used as a framework to understand aspects of climate change denial, suggesting that some individuals who lack expertise in climate science may overestimate their understanding of the topic. This overconfidence can lead them to dismiss the expert consensus on human-caused climate change.

Gemini goes on to explain that this results from a tendency for the sceptic to believe they are better equipped to judge the validity of climate science than career scientists, whilst they also rely upon non-peer-reviewed sources or cherry-picked data. Also, the sceptic is assumed to be unable to handle the complexity of the subject matter and to be particularly vulnerable to misinformation. Such is the presupposed lot of the climate change sceptics; they are just too dumb to understand that they are dumb.

Except for one thing. When one looks into the Dunning-Kruger effect it actually refers to the observation that the under-skilled overestimate their competence whilst the most skilled tend to underestimate. This led Dunning and Kruger to speculate that two factors were at play: a failure of metacognition amongst the unskilled, contrasting with an over-compensating metacognition that comes with the attainment of skill. This hand waving psychobabble had an air of plausibility and so was readily accepted as the correct explanation of the data. The Ig Nobel prize gave the paper a notoriety, and the effect – soon to be dubbed the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’ – was then enthusiastically absorbed into popular culture. Everyone started using it as their favourite put-down, used to simultaneously deride the opponent whilst demonstrating one’s own erudition. The problem, however, is that the effect never needed a psychological explanation. Dunning and Kruger were just observing a basic statistical effect known as regression to the mean (RTM). Essentially, if you are at the bottom of the range there is more scope for you to overestimate than underestimate. And if you are at the top end, then vice versa. Tellingly, if you point this out to Google Gemini it will back you up with:

Yes, regression to the mean (RTM) is a significant statistical factor that critics argue explains much of the Dunning-Kruger (DK) pattern, especially when studies use the same noisy measure for both ability and self-assessment, causing extreme scores to naturally drift toward the average on retesting; however, Dunning and Kruger argue that a true psychological component (metacognitive deficit) also exists, with poor performers lacking insight, though RTM explains the general upward bias in self-estimates for low performers and downward bias for high performers.

To summarise, a simple statistical effect (RTM) explains the data but D&K and their supporters are still adamant that it accompanies a true metacognitive effect.

Forgive me if I remain sceptical, but if we are to determine whether D&K’s defiance has any merit we will have to drill down into the neuroscience of metacognition, i.e. we need to understand what is going on in the brain when an individual reflects upon their own competence.

It has been understood for many years now that perception is not a passive activity. When the brain receives signals via its sensory channels, those parts of the brain that mediate the inputs will excite other parts that are dedicated to signal interpretation, and yet the same is true the other way round; brain scans show that the executive centres dedicated to signal interpretation are just as active in exciting the areas that mediate the inputs. This demonstrates that the mind is using mental models that not only aid interpretation, they also influence the information being fed to it. There is a real sense in which you see what you believe.

This is true for visual and auditory inputs as well as when interpreting what is going on in other people’s minds, i.e. we have a ‘theory of mind’ that we use to transform the observed behaviours of others into a meaningful agential world. We use introspection to evaluate our fellow man and, as a result, we then observe a world that fits our preconceptions. But it doesn’t stop there. We also have a theory of our own mind that we use to aid in that introspection, i.e. we build up a mental model of our own mentality – a model that we use to aid in our evaluation of our own competence and agency.

In his book, “A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality”, neuroscientist Daniel Yon explains the problem as follows:

We might think that, ideally, when we raise a mirror to our abilities, we should see an accurate picture bouncing back. But, in reality, introspection is ambiguous and imprecise. When the brain observes itself, it fails to muster a clear or complete picture.

To make sense of the blurry images that self-reflection provides, our brains need a theory of ourselves – a suite of predictions that embody our expectations about our strengths and weaknesses, our facilities and faults. That means forming beliefs about where we will succeed and where we will fail.

This mental model appears to be developed as a result of experience, in which episodes of momentary confidence, fed by their salient successes, aggregate over time into a theory of general competence. Providing support for this view, neuroscientist Marion Rouault of the Paris Brain Institute has used brain scanning to determine that a suite of regions including the prefrontal cortex are instrumental in mediating moments of confidence but it is the striatum that stores and aggregates them into a theory of general competence. Yon explains how this mechanism has a general significance:

This kind of self-modelling may have broader consequences. If this way of thinking is correct, past successes cause us to form expectations that we’ll be successful in the future – perhaps nudging us towards overconfidence in our abilities.

There are two things to note here. Firstly, contrary to the musings of D&K, the overconfidence is demonstrated by skilled practitioners who have learned to believe in their general competence through accumulated moments of experienced success. Secondly, the mechanisms are universal – there is nothing in this research to suggest that the metacognition only kicks in above a certain level of competence. It’s still there in the less skilled, it simply operates in the opposite direction causing the unskilled to lack confidence in their general abilities.

All of this leaves D&K in a sticky position. Not only do they have a set of data that can be perfectly well explained by a simple statistical effect — without recourse to theories of metacognition — but their particular theories are contradicted by modern neuroscientific research in the area. According to such research, it’s the skilled who should be more prone to overconfidence, not the unskilled. The only reason why this is not reflected in the D&K data is because of the regression to the mean that all such data sets inevitably exhibit.

People tend to be blind to their own weaknesses and demonstrate unwarranted confidence; this much is true, but it isn’t what matters here. What matters is how easy it was for the world and its dog to come to accept beyond question that it is only the unskilled who suffer from this blind spot. It’s as if the world was primed to latch on to an idea that seemed perfectly suited for the clever put down. It’s a classic ‘scientists say’ factoid that can be used to mock the sceptical layman whilst keeping the expert practitioner well beyond reproach. The fact that the thinking behind it has no scientific merit matters very little now. It serves a purpose that is too important to relinquish, too precious to squander. It is an idea developed by academic intelligentsia that happens to ensure they are held in particular esteem, since it is only they who are supposed to have mastered the art of metacognition — it is only they who could never be blind to their failings.

I’m sure this idea has its appeal to those it favours, but it is an idea that loses its potency once one realises that it was dreamt up by a pair of academics who still don’t seem to have fully come to terms with the fact that they overlooked a simple statistical effect before pronouncing to the world. Yes, everyone tends to be blind to their weaknesses. The only difference is that the expert’s blindness tends to have more serious consequences, and there is nothing that demonstrates this more perfectly than the world’s acceptance of the fictitious Dunning-Kruger effect.

43 Comments

  1. John,

    Thank you for a very plausible explanation. Over the years you have introduced us to a number of reports/studies by climate-concerned “experts”, whose mission seems to be to explain why climate sceptics (often labelled “deniers” for good measure) are not only wrong, but stupid, deluded, incapable of understanding their limitations, etc.

    The curious thing is that when I read what such people often have to say about us, my first thought is usually “Have you looked in a mirror recently?” Why? Because so often, from our side of the divide, what they write about us seems to apply in full measure to them.

    I wonder if the exponents of Dunning-Kruger, who lob it at us sceptics, ever contemplate that it might apply to them? It’s just a shame that it doesn’t exist!

    Liked by 2 people

  2. Mark,

    Whilst it appears that the DK effect does not exist, there are other relevant cognitive biases for which there is convincing evidence. One is the Above Average effect, in which we all tend to over-rate ourselves. There are others I could mention, such as Bias Blind Spot, but the point is this: they are all universal biases that are woven into human nature. There is no reason to assume that they are particularly to be found amongst those who choose to be sceptical of certain aspects of the claims made by climate activists. Unfortunately, such activism does seem to have captured most of the psychology profession and, as a result, people who should know better are prone to focus their attention on one select group when applying their professional understanding. I have written on this before. For example, when commenting upon John Cook’s FLICC taxonomy, where I said:

    “Although aimed at the denier, there isn’t a single valid aspect of FLICC that cannot be readily turned around and used as a means of criticising the thinking behind climate alarmism.“

    Your Lack of Stature Disturbs Me – Climate Scepticism

    Liked by 2 people

  3. Excellent stuff John – thanks. For my part I’ve always tried to avoid DK accusations by sticking to the simple reality that I’m agnostic about climate science. Here’s a short note I wrote on that: https://web.archive.org/web/20210123234531/https://www.oxfordclimatealumni.com/post/opinion-why-i-m-agnostic-re-cc-science.

    It’s interesting that sometimes activists (and some sceptics) get quite cross when I refuse to express an opinion on climate science. Instead, I confine my comments to international climate politics and I particular to the interpretation of relevant agreements and treaties – where I believe I have some relevant expertise. However I daresay that I may well be overconfident about my true level of expertise in that area.

    Liked by 3 people

  4. Robin,

    In your circumstances, I think you are very wise to remain agnostic. In fact, we should all be careful to stay in our lane, and (although I am sure our critics would disagree) I think all of us at CliScep are careful to do so.

    One of the problems with the way in which the brain generates its model of its own competencies is that an illusion of general competence can emerge as a result of experiencing success in a specific field. The lesson to be taken on board is that our past glories do not qualify us to hold forth on details of the Earth’s atmospheric dynamics. As a layman, one can glean enough to appreciate much of what is going on, and occasionally that is sufficient to throw out the odd challenge, but that should be as far as it goes.

    For my part, my professional insights go no further than to enable me to comment in general upon issues of uncertainty analysis as applied to decision-making. But since decision-making under uncertainty is the nature of the beast, I think that goes a long way towards justifying most of my CliScep contributions. Or at least that’s what I hope. At the end of the day, we are as much at the mercy of cognitive bias as the next person.

    Liked by 4 people

  5. Thanks for this, it gets so tiring, and when you tell someone that labelling someone with Dunning-Kruger is an example of the thing they think exists (but doesn’t, hence a version of D-K) it is usually lost on them.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Speaking for myself, I am particularly prone not so much to overestimating my own competence but overestimating the competence of empirical data to cast serious doubt upon, or even disprove fundamental tenets of the Settled Science. I think that must be the phenomenon of projection of D-K onto hard data. That’s the problem with climate contrarian empirical data; it only takes a sceptic to come along and provide it with an inflated sense of self-worth.

    Liked by 3 people

  7. I had to Google Ig Nobel award to jog my memory (it looked like LG Nobel). I remember Russell Johnson (the professor on Gilligan’s Island) talking about getting one. Since their AI gave me the answer, I thought I’d ask it to evaluate this post. It seems to be, if not at a loss for words, uncharacteristically brief:

    Can you evaluate john ridgway’s latest cliscep post on Dunning Kruger?

    John Ridgway’s latest post on Cliscep addressing the Dunning-Kruger effect is titled “Dunning-Kruger. Dunning-Kruger. Quite possibly the most notorious metacognitive effect that doesn’t exist” and was published on December 12, 2025. For more details, visit cliscep.com.

    Could you elaborate further ?

    In a Cliscep post from December 12, 2025, titled “Dunning-Kruger. Dunning-Kruger. Quite possibly the most notorious metacognitive effect that doesn’t exist,” John Ridgway contends that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not a genuine phenomenon but rather a result of statistical anomalies or broad misinterpretations. To read more from this author, visit Cliscep.com.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. MJB,

    I agree that it is very tedious to see how often people resort to accusing others of suffering from the DK effect, and for that reason I would be reluctant to accuse the accusers of being ironically afflicted. When I first came across the DK effect my first instinct was not to deny its existence. On the contrary, I was as ready as the next person to take the D&K explanations at face value. I think this is a natural first response borne of a tendency to accept expert authority — until given a reason not to. The unfortunate side effect of this is that such trust, when misplaced, can quickly result in an entrenched dogma because everyone is going along with it — wisdom of the crowd and all of that. It wasn’t until it was pointed out to me that regression to the mean rendered D&K’s metacognition explanation redundant that the lightbulb went on for me. Since then, what little I have read on the neuroscience of confidence has only increased my scepticism and confirmed something I had suspected all along — metacognition is innate in us all and doesn’t develop as we acquire skills. If anything, we become more overconfident in our general competence as we become more proficient in specific areas. A form of DK effect if you like, but certainly not what D&K have been trying to say. I would much rather focus upon the fact that we are all prone to overconfidence — especially the experts!

    Liked by 2 people

  11. Jaime,

    Ah, empirical data. What would we do without it? Run predictive models, I suppose.

    Like

  12. Mike,

    You have inspired me to make my own enquiry. I asked Google Gemini the following:

    “Is the article “Dunning-Kruger – quite possibly the most notorious metacognitive effect that doesn’t exist”, published on Cliscep, December 12, 2025, a fair assessment?”

    To which it replied:

    “It is difficult to determine the fairness of the article “Dunning-Kruger – quite possibly the most notorious metacognitive effect that doesn’t exist” without reviewing its content. Based on the source and topic, it likely presents a critical, contrarian view on the Dunning-Kruger effect, not a scientific consensus. You can read the full article on cliscep.”

    Charming! Basically, it is saying “You can read the article on Cliscep, but I won’t be bothering. I’m sure it will be crap”.

    Liked by 2 people

  13. So, GG, what is the “scientific consensus” on D-K, as opposed to a “critical, contrarian view”?

    That it is both real and dangerous when afflicting climate sceptics, in that it undermines the “scientific consensus” on man-made global warming, i.e. that it is both real and dangerous?

    Like

  14. Chatbots do not(?) search the web when answering a query. They are trained on a subset of the web. New pages would not feature in that training, hence the terse reply from GG.

    Regarding D-K, I can attest to having experienced a form of it myself. A kid from a small town, I thought I was good at chess, until I played people who were actually good at chess, whereupon I realised that I was terrible at chess, relative to the players in the new bigger pool I accessed when I went to university. There, I had empirical proof of just how good (bad) I was.

    I wonder how all this is supposed to differ from the unconscious incompetence -> unconscious competence arc. (I bet I can juggle. Oh, actually, I can’t juggle after all. I can juggle when I try hard. I can juggle without thinking.)

    Regarding the competence of climate scientists generally, what proportion of them could explain to an intelligent layperson the process of an interaction between an infrared photon and a carbon dioxide molecule, which is the foundation of global warming?

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Jit,

    Thank you for the clarification regarding AI.

    As for your experiences relating to chess prowess, may I respectfully suggest that even that wasn’t an illustration of DK. Rather, it was simply an example of how easy it is to draw a wrong conclusion based upon incomplete information. In this case, it just happens to be a conclusion regarding how confident you should be in winning future contests. If it were an example of DK, then your over-estimation of your chess abilities would be due to the fact that you hadn’t yet played enough chess at a high enough level of ability to have developed the metacognitive capabilities required to accurately introspect. This was always the woo-woo bit for me as far as DK theory is concerned. How can we say that skill-learning, in general, is the means by which the individual develops the cognitive tools necessary for accurate introspection? I’d always struggled with that aspect of it — at least until the simple statistical explanation for the data was pointed out to me, and then I stopped worrying about it.

    In reality, overconfidence comes from having a track record of success that is a poor basis for predicting future success. Your chess victories set you up as an expert within your field. You were not to know how unrepresentative that field was. But it was this parochial expertise that set you up for disappointment. As I say, it is usually the expert in the room that is most likely to be overconfident.

    Liked by 2 people

  16. P.S. Regarding the competence of climate scientists, I will say only this. There seem to be a lot of people about who think that, because they have an excellent understanding of the Earth’s atmospheric dynamics, they are ideally placed to understand how risk and uncertainty works when making decisions under uncertainty. They are not.

    Also, you are quite right to wonder how all of this fits into the unconscious competence arc.

    Liked by 4 people

  17. Jaime: Doesn’t it rather depend on what are included as “fundamental tenets”? There are processes at the lab and similar scale that I will accept without demur (and treat as fundamental tenets) like some gases can be temporarily excited by some IR wavelengths, or it’s harder to push CO2 into warm sodastream than a cold one, or at the moment of death a tree contains more carbon than it did when it was a sapling. But what are the fundamental tenets of “settled” climate science? Are they the same as those above and their ilk, or are there a set of fundamental meta-truths sacred to a climate change believer. One candidate for the latter is that humankind is a blot on the landscape. Another is that lab-scale processes like those listed above scale up with little adjustment even when embedded in the much larger soup of processes that is the Earth System. Leading from this is a set of tenets that there exists a nice neat box – “a climate system” – whose outputs can be readily predicted from its inputs, changes of output can likewise be predicted from changes of input, man-induced changes to inputs invariably have negative (to us and the planet) consequences to outputs, and that inputs can serve as control knobs.

    Liked by 2 people

  18. Max, for example, the fundamental tenet that ALL warming since 1950 to present is due to GHGs. Empirical data proves that most or all surface (and ocean) warming since 2000 at least, probably since the 1980s, is not due to decreased outgoing long wave radiation. The accumulation of heat in the oceans is not caused by some mysterious microscopic ‘skin effect’ reducing the temperature gradient directly above the surface of the oceans, due to ‘back radiation’; it’s caused by increasing incident short wave solar radiation. Another example: extreme high temperatures recorded during heatwaves are mostly not attributable to a modest multidecadal regional secular trend in rising background temperature. Likewise, very warm night time temperatures are mostly not due to said secular trend, but to increasing urbanisation. There’s quite a lot of empirical data out there which is suffering from a severe case of Dunning-Kruger.

    Liked by 1 person

  19. John – found your “asked Google Gemini” comment interesting/chilling, given this bit in the reply –

    “Based on the source and topic, it likely presents a critical, contrarian view on the Dunning-Kruger effect, not a scientific consensus“

    Given what Jit said below your comment, it seems you (the source) have been flagged as “contrarian“.

    Just before you jump of a bridge or find that samurai sword in the attic, you are in good company – McIntyre & McKitrick: CLIMATEGATE: UNTANGLING MYTH AND REALITY 10 YEARS LATER – Climate Depot

    Liked by 2 people

  20. I have a standard reply to anyone accusing me of suffering from the D-K effect:

    “I know next to nothing about cognitive psychology, but I’ve read Dunning & Kruger’s paper, and it’s bollocks.”

    They never get the joke.

    Liked by 3 people

  21. Dunning & Kruger divided their sample into quartiles, which is pretty rough & ready, and noted a slight shift from the 4th to the 3rd, & a slight shift from the 1st to the 2nd.

    To get an idea of how regression to the mean works, imagine if you divided people into quartiles by income. In the top quartile you’d have Elon Musk & middle managers, & in the bottom quartile there’d be homeless beggars & shop assistants. Then ask shop assistants if they’re very poor or only quite, and middle managers if they’re very rich or only quite.

    Our language was not created in order to satisfy the tidy minds of makers of bar graphs.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. It occurs to me that I should have provided my readers with a couple of references, just in case they might wish to read more into the subject. For those who enjoy statistics, there is this paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, “A Statistical Explanation of the Dunning–Kruger Effect”:

    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.840180/full?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23178707225&gbraid=0AAAAAC_sJ7lw7mZHuH9gbJ3jrZKkwCgmN&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjq6s8-e8kQMVWotQBh0ljQMwEAAYASAAEgKOEPD_BwE

    The abstract reads:

    An explanation of the Dunning–Kruger effect is provided which does not require any psychological explanation, because it is derived as a statistical artifact. This is achieved by specifying a simple statistical model which explicitly takes the (random) boundary constraints into account. The model fits the data almost perfectly.

    There are many more excellent articles to read on this subject, but to offer the psychological perspective, I will pick just one published by the British Psychological Society, “The persistent irony of the Dunning Kruger effect”:

    https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/persistent-irony-dunning-kruger-effect

    The concluding statement reads:

    There is a self-satisfied air of superiority when the DKE is ‘weaponised’ as a way to dismiss the views of others, or to impugn their intelligence. Calling someone out as a victim of the DKE seems watertight, because any denials can be taken to confirm the lack of awareness that the insult implies. But the irony is that to namecheck the DKE in this way shows a lack of awareness of the evidence, so any air of superiority is only an illusion.

    Liked by 5 people

  23. I think it’s no coincidence that the D-K card was (and probably still is) played very often by the denizens at ATTP whenever anyone remotely sceptical of the consensus narrative on man-made climate change or the renewables ‘solution’ to an imaginary climate crisis dares to comment. D-K is a boon to Konsensus Enforcers. Channelling my inner conspiracy theorist, perhaps that was why it was invented, or at least brought to academic prominence by the ‘science community’.

    Liked by 3 people

  24. Jaime,

    Yes, the DK accusation does seem to feature quite a lot over at ATTP, as indeed it does at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. I don’t know that it was invented for the purpose of attacking any one particular group, but it certainly seems here to stay, and it hangs about with some pretty high-profile blessing. Here is TV’s cleverest man, Stephen Fry, using his smarmy dulcet tones to DK anyone who supports Trump, is worried about uncontrolled immigration or is insufficiently concerned regarding climate change:

    Liked by 4 people

  25. Gosh!

    I’m keeping out of this one, far above my stupidity to comprehend any of the above other than I have decided that Ai is not all its cracked up to be.

    I have just read that we may be entering a cooling phase at some point in the not too distant future which I will probably miss as I will be in a box somewhere.

    LL

    Like

  26. John, I have a theory about Stephen Fry, which may just be me overestimating my ability to analyse human behaviour: his brain is too far removed from the ground and therefore he lacks the grounded common sense which us short-arses have in abundance.

    Liked by 3 people

  27. Jaime,

    How dare you? He’s a national treasure! That said, after watching the video it did occur to me that it’s possible to go off someone.

    Liked by 3 people

  29. But he was very good in Blackadder.

    Actually, joking apart, I think he nicely illustrates the point I am making in my article. He is far too clever to understand how stupid he can be. Was it George Orwell who said there are some things that are so ridiculous that only an intellectual could believe them? In Fry’s case, it is obvious that his metacognition is highly informed by his ideologies and political leanings. As you say: Clever? Yes. Grounded? Meh!

    Liked by 4 people

  30. Whilst researching for this article, I thought I would look to see if the neuroscientist Marion Rouault had anything specific to say regarding the Dunning-Kruger effect. I didn’t find anything, but I did find this interesting paper:

    “Illusion of knowledge in statistics among clinicians: evaluating the alignment between objective accuracy and subjective confidence, an online survey”

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370159411_Illusion_of_knowledge_in_statistics_among_clinicians_evaluating_the_alignment_between_objective_accuracy_and_subjective_confidence_an_online_survey

    The point is that clinicians think they are much better at statistics than they actually are. You might say this is a classic case of Dunning-Kruger, i.e. unskilled and unaware. However, it is quite the opposite, or at least it isn’t the effect that DK describe. Dunning and Kruger argue that the unskilled are unaware because they lack the skills required for metacognition. These they list as logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, grammar, humour, etc. The problem here, of course, is that there is no reason to believe that highly qualified clinicians are particularly lacking in these areas. On the contrary, as skilled people their capacity for metacognition is presupposed to be very good and yet they are still overconfident with regard to specific aspects of their professional duties. It isn’t that they lack metacognitive capabilities, rather their metacognition has caused them to create a model of their own mentality that presupposes a high level of general competence, which in turn leads to overconfidence in some areas. I’d like to bet that their overconfidence in statistics is every bit as pronounced as it is for the man in the street – or for climate scientists, for that matter.

    Liked by 2 people

  31. William Donaldson, aka Henry Root, reckoned that Stephen Fry was ‘the stupid person’s idea of a clever person’. (He stole that description from Elizabeth Bowen, who had applied it to Aldous Huxley.)

    I watched and enjoyed quite a lot of QI back when it was fronted by Fry until in several episodes he (in his usual smug and somewhat patronising way) presented as fact some things that were, in fact, quite obviously fiction. So I stopped watching. If your whole shtick is that you are presenting things that only clever people know about and some of those things aren’t actually true…

    Liked by 2 people

  32. Well, back on the subject of Stephen Fry, who plays the D-K card to smear ‘climate deniers’. It would appear he is one of the c’lebs who were prominent in the #FreeAlaa campaign, the Egyptian ‘dissident’ (as the BBC would have it) jailed in Egypt, who has now been welcomed with open arms into the UK by a “delighted” Prime Minister. Problem is, Alaa El-Fattah is (belatedly recognised) a self declared murderous Jew-hating, white English hating, police hating extremist terrorist and this fact seems to have completely gone unnoticed by Fry and other luvvies (along with our government) – notably including Emma Thompson and Naomi Klein, who by coincidence also happen to be very vocal advocates of catastrophic man-made climate change, and our urgent need to ‘do something’ about it, plus outspoken critics of we ‘deniers and delayers’ and ‘merchants of doubt’ trying our best to challenge the Settled Science and the renewables ‘solution’ to saving the planet from imminent Thermageddon.

    There’s a definite pattern emerging here – which does not flatter luvvies or climate alarmists, Labour Prime Ministers, or former Conservative Home Secretaries for that matter. We need more climate deniers to keep the nation safe from murderous Islamic terrorists and fanatical ‘clean energy’ enthusiasts.

    Liked by 1 person

  33. Jaime,

    As should be obvious to anyone who reads what I write here, I am no fan of Nigel Farage; nor am I impressed by anti-semitism, which these days seems to be a left-wing problem rather than a right-wing one. I may not always succeed in being even-handed in the way I regard events and people, depending on how they impact on my world-view, but I do try to avoid holding two contradictory views at the same time, and I hope that I strive to use critical thinking. The people at the Guardian should try it some time.

    They have for weeks now been running a campaign to vilify Farage, based on allegations (none of which are evidenced in writing, and which are therefore a case of depending on who you believe, since Farage denies the allegations) about what he said and did when at Dulwich school more than 40 years ago. Take this one for instance:

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/dec/05/nigel-farage-former-dulwich-college-pupil-alleges-said-thats-the-way-back-to-africa

    …Yinka Bankole, who claims he had just started at the school when a 17-year-old Farage singled him out for abuse…

    Meanwhile, just 3 days ago the Guardian wrote in fairly fulsome terms about Al Fatteh’s arrival in the UK:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/26/british-egyptian-activist-alaa-abd-el-fattah-arrives-in-uk-after-travel-ban-lifted

    Since then a storm has broken regarding his tweets, and the Guardian seems to be of the view that they were so long ago and he was so young when he tweeted them, that it’s really a case of “nothing to see here”. They’re clever enough not to say that explicitly, but it’s clear that their sympathies are with him rather than with those who criticise him:

    “British-Egyptian rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah apologises for ‘hurtful’ tweets

    Campaigner recently released from prison makes statement after PM’s support is questioned by Tory MPs”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/british-egyptian-rights-activist-alaa-abd-el-fattah-apologises-for-hurtful-tweets

    Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian human rights campaigner, has apologised unreservedly for what he accepted were shocking and hurtful tweets that he wrote more than 10 years ago in what he described as heated online battles.…

    Some of the more offensive tweets aren’t mentioned in the article. Then they offer up an extensive quote from him in exculpation:

    ...“Looking back, I see the writings of a much younger person, deeply enmeshed in antagonistic online cultures, utilising flippant, shocking and sarcastic tones in the nascent, febrile world of social media. But this young man never intended to offend a wider public and was, in the real world, engaged in the non-violent pro-democracy movement and repeatedly incarcerated for calling for full equality, human rights and democracy for all.

    “Today, this middle-aged father firmly believes all our fates are entwined and we can only achieve prosperous and safe lives for our children together. All the initiatives I’ve led reflect this”….

    And then we get this (which seems to have been written to suggest that because he was so “young” and it was such a long time ago, he should be excused:

    …Most of the tweets were written between 2010 and 2012 during the Arab spring, when he was turning 30.…

    If the allegations against Farage are true, then they reveal an extremely unpleasant schoolboy. The tweets from Al Fatteh (which haven’t been – can’t be – denied) were written by an adult just over a decade ago, and contain sentiments that are worse than anything Farage is accused of saying or doing. Indeed, they are the sort of tweets that have seen UK subjects sent to prison fairly recently.

    The Guardian. Compare and contrast, eh?

    Liked by 2 people

  34. The Guardian managed to find room yesterday on its front page to rake up more archaeological dirt on Farage, on the same day that other papers led with the hot story of our newest neighbour. Quite astonishing.

    Liked by 2 people

  35. Wow, it’s almost like, for Guardian journalists, ‘far right’ people like Farage and white working class hurty words tweeters like Connolly are not quite as human as people like El Fattah and hence any hateful words which they have (or have not) uttered should be treated with the utmost seriousness and contempt, as irrefutable evidence of their despicable (and essentially irredeemable) nature. Whereas, far more serious direct incitement to murder and truly disgusting hateful bile coming from the likes of people like El Fattah is evidence only of a fully reversible and redeemable moral failure, which Guardian writers, in their infinite wisdom, have decided is fully reversed. El Fattah is literally more human (i.e. prone to error, but capable of moral reform) than Farage or the Lucy Connollys of this world will ever be. I think we all know where that kind of thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, eventually leads.

    The double-think extends to the targets of hatred too: to berate and/or threaten with violence black and brown ‘minorities’ is a far greater offence than to do the same (but with far greater vitriol and more direct incitement to harm) against white English, Dutch, and Germans, jews or police officers.

    Liked by 1 person

  36. I have mentioned here before that my recently deceased father-in-law had a saying that some people are so clever, they’re thick. By which he meant that some people are so cerebral that they are removed from normal life and common sense, with the result that they are capable of saying and doing extraordinarily stupid things. Perhaps more to the point, they are utterly unaware of the stupidity of their behaviour or comments.

    Is that a sort of reverse Dunning Kruger effect? Being so clever that you don’t know you’re stupid.

    Like

  37. Mark,

    Is that a sort of reverse Dunning Kruger effect? Being so clever that you don’t know you’re stupid.

    Well, yes and no – but more yes than no.

    Dunning and Kruger advocated the idea that the less skilled are more likely to overestimate their abilities whilst the skilled are likely to underestimate theirs. They offered two psychological explanations for this – a lack of metacognition in the unskilled allied to a miscalibration of task difficulty committed by the skilled. The first causes the unskilled to fail to see their own failure, and the second causes the skilled to fail to see their own successes. This combination of explanations was invented to explain a data artifact that turns out to be the result of a straightforward statistical effect – regression to the mean. In fact, there is no reliable evidence that the unskilled are more likely to overestimate their capability than the skilled. Hence, there is no Dunning Kruger effect to reverse.

    However, there is evidence for an effect that is the opposite of what Dunning and Kruger had claimed. In fact, nearly everyone overestimates their abilities, but the skilled are more inclined to do so. This has nothing to do with metacognition or the lack thereof, and everything to do with how past success distorts the mental model we create of our general capabilities. That is the insight that your late father-in-law picked up on. Clever people are just too clever to appreciate the ways in which they are not. You can call that Dunning-Kruger in reverse if you want, but only if you ignore that even people who are not clever will, more often than not, overestimate themselves, although they are less likely to do so.

    Liked by 2 people

  38. By the way , perhaps conscious of criticism of its hypocritical reporting, the Guardian makes a slightly better fist of El Fatteh reporting here (though it still feels the need to implicitly offer exculpation by telling us he was “turning 30” when he posted the tweets):

    “What did Alaa Abd el-Fattah say in past social media posts and why is there a backlash?

    British-Egyptian activist has apologised over tweets appearing to condone violence against Zionists and police”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/what-did-alaa-abd-el-fattah-say-past-social-media-posts-why-backlash

    …Yet this isn’t the first time Abd el-Fattah’s comments on social media have provoked controversy. In 2014, his tweets cost him a nomination for the European parliament’s Sakharov prize. The group backing him withdrew the nomination for the human rights award, saying they had discovered a tweet from 2012 in which he called for the murder of Israelis. In 2015, Abd el-Fattah claimed his comments had been taken out of context….

    Liked by 1 person

  40. See the Guardian also covered/had a podcast – 250 days on hunger strike: Can Laila Soueif secure her son’s freedom? – podcast | Egypt | The Guardian

    Presented by Michael Safi with Patrick Wintour; produced by Natalie Ktena, Ivor Manley and Joel Cox; executive producer Courtney Yusuf – Wed 11 Jun 2025 03.00 BST

    On the “Dunning Kruger effect” comment John R made above – “In fact, nearly everyone overestimates their abilities, but the skilled are more inclined to do so”. It made me think about the rise of DIY stores over the years.

    Must admit “but the skilled are more inclined to do so” statement makes no sense to me, am I missing something?

    Like

  41. dfhunter,

    It’s just a case of success breeding self-belief and self-belief leading to incautiousness. The unskilled don’t get the chance to experience that giddy success.

    Like

  42. Ah, the Guardian, back on track:

    “Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but he is no ‘anti-white Islamist’. Why does the British right want you to believe he is?

    Naomi Klein“

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/31/alaa-abd-el-fattah-tweets-british-right-citizenship

    What is the proper punishment for hateful social media posts? Should you lose your account? Your job? Your citizenship? Go to jail? Die? For the people who have launched a campaign against the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, no punishment is too great.…

    Funnily enough, the Guardian wasn’t in any hurry to exculpate far right hateful social media posts, and was quite happy for those behind them to go to prison for it.

    …I have no interest in defending the awful tweets in question, which Abd el-Fattah posted in the early 2010s. Many are indefensible and he has apologised “unequivocally” for them. …

    I have no interest in defending the awful tweets in question, which Lucy Connolly posted, but she speedily took them down and apologised unequivocally for them.

    The Guardian’s double standards are a thing to behold. I hope I don’t share them. I have never defended Lucy Connolly, and I wouldn’t defend Alaa Abd el-Fattah. BY the way, the author of the article is:

    Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia

    Once again, we see the strange alliance, exemplified by Greta, between climate alarmists and Islam.

    Liked by 2 people

  43. Mark,

    It’s not even as if el-Fattah’s apologies are genuine. According to the BBC he has been caught liking posts that are suggesting he has just been a victim of a Zionist plot to discredit him:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dm9944glpo

    Of course, he needn’t have gone online to read conspiracy theories that place him in a good light; he only had to read the Guardian. As for Naomi Klein, I believe she is an ecofeminist, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist Jew; which probably covers about 95% of the Guardian readership.

    Liked by 1 person

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