Never a truer word..

I walked through the Altstadt on my early morning walk last Sunday and did some window shopping in a small shop there that sells, shall we say, quirky home accessories.

One of the signs in the window said this: Erstaunlich, dass Leute mit wenig Ahnung viel Meinung haben.

Or in English:  [It's] Astounding that people with little idea have a lot of opinion.

This puts me in mind of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that David G. reminded me of recently. This says that people with low ability for a task overestimate their ability. (You can look this up on Wikipedia.)

And a week or so ago, I heard this quote on a YouTube ad: "One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right but not enough to know you're wrong."

Yet another quote from YouTube, which is all over the web, too:  "In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." 

All these things are going through my mind because certain people in my life - three generations of them - have demonstrated very clearly  their lack of reading  and reasoning skills and yet are blaming me for their lack of understanding. Two of these people left school as soon as they could - which meant that they didn't even attempt one exam at the age of 16. The other was forced to stay at school until the age of 18 - because that is the law in the UK these days. But they all blamed me for any miscomprehension and not their lack of reading comprehension skills. 

They put me in mind of a lot of Daily Mail readers. When, for example, a recent article pointed out that continental Europe was suffering from drought and had done so for the last few years, a whole load of Daily Mail readers claimed that that was because there were too many people (i.e. Germany had let in too many asylum seekers and refugees) and too much industry and agriculture.

And I wondered if that was the problem with drought regions around the world, like the Sahara - too many people, too much industry and overfarming - rather than the correct definition of the word "drought", which is too little precipitation (rainfall or snowfall) in a given period of time.

As the saying goes, in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. 

I despair sometimes. The fact that people cannot use the Internet to check facts and definitions and to learn about the world around them in general just leaves me - to use another vulgar phrase - gobsmacked.