When illumination Is So Close and Yet So Far
The Germans have a word for it (of course they do — those Germans). Fremdschämen
Fremdschämen describes a peculiar kind of mortification. According to Psychology Today blogger Daniel R. Hawes, it's more than being embarrassed for yourself or another. It describes the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. Hawes goes on to describe a related psychological phenomenon — The Dunning-Kruger complex.
Hawes explains: "The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence."
They don’t acknowledge the existence of what former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld called “the unknown unknowns,” things so far outside your range of knowledge that not only do you not know them, you don’t even know that you don’t know them.
Dunning described his fascination with “unknown unknowns” thusly: “If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.”
Note that Dunning indicts “everybody” here. Because we’re all a little Dunning-Kruger about something. Including, perhaps, Mr. Dunning himself about the theory named after him (several follow-up studies have failed to come to the same conclusion that he reached).
If you’d like to read more, here are some good sources on the story behind the effect, the effect itself, and contrary opinions on the matter:
“The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is” — Errol Morris’ Interview with David Dunning in the New York Times: https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma
“The Dunning-Kruger Effect Shows that People Don’t Know What They Don’t Know” — Author Corey Powell of OpenMind Magazine interviews David Dunning: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-shows-that-people-dont-know-what-they-dont-know/
“Debunking the Dunning-Kruger Effect” by Eric C. Gaze in The Conversation — The Dunning-Kruger theory is not without its critics, many of whom argue that the results haven’t stood up to multiple peer-reviewed subsequent studies — this is one that makes that point very succinctly: https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-dunning-kruger-effect-the-least-skilled-people-know-how-much-they-dont-know-but-everyone-thinks-they-are-better-than-average-195527
And — because apparently myth has overtaken reality in this particular case — I present a very dedicated and skeptical Australian Reddit user whose investigation of the Lemon Juice Bandit reveals some distinct cherry-picking of the data (could this be a case of justice denied because the story was too hilarious to resist? You decide): https://www.reddit.com/r/Pennsylvania/comments/183cjrc/the_mystery_of_the_lemon_juice_bandits_allegheny/