People in tech have Dunning-Kruger syndrome about people in literally every other way of life/profession @baldur
@cstross Interesting. I try to avoid the use of the label because the effect doesn’t exist. This article summarizes it well: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202012/dunning-kruger-isnt-real
@mlevison @cstross @baldur As an alternative to D-K, I'd like to offer the (hypothetical) "celebrity expert syndrome". People who are celebrated for their work in one field tend to be given a licence to exercise their authority in other fields. Some of them then have a big enough ego and little enough self-awareness to actually form prescriptive statements on things they know nothing about. This can become a community trend, too.
I have an example for this from outside tech.
@mlevison @cstross @baldur in 2010 there was an airplane crash that killed a few dozen top Polish officials, diplomats, military officers etc. including the president of the country. There was an investigation that concluded it was a perfect storm of human error and negligence.
There were also conspiracy theories peddled, among others, by people with PhDs in everything but airplane accidents (including things like history or medicine). "this guy must be right because he has PhD", basically.
@jzillw @mlevison @cstross @baldur Some of them don't even have any meaningful contribution to make in the discipline that they co-opted and then ten to pontificate on other issues e.g., Space Karen who cannot get his rockets to fly had the temerity to predict that Covid would have been over by April 2020.