The myth of the omnicompetent individual

The belief that one is capable of correctly judging anything one comes into contact with.  To me people believing this seem to have too high self-esteem.  There is nothing inherently wrong with having high self-esteem.  But it has to be of some sort of proportion to one’s self-knowledge.  People believing in their own personal omicompetence apparently don’t have this.

Much belief in this myth can be explained by Dunning–Kruger effect.  People who barely know anything about a subject think they already master it.  This would not have been so much of a problem if not for the denial of other people’s competency.  The ones believing their own omicompetence often denies the existence of people more competent than themselves.  This leads to hostility to the actually competent.

Belief in one’s own omicompetence also underlie accusing debunkers of gaslighting.  Now, gaslighting is manipulating people to believe themselves to be crazy.  The intent is to make the manipulated person stay in a destructive relationship.  This is not the aim of debunkers.  They only want to show that you might not be as good at judging a particular thing as you think.  Ones does not have to be crazy in order to misjudge.

I am going to write this blog about a wide range of subjects.  Most of them has to do with misconceptions, their origin and flaws.  But I don’t consider myself an expert on any of these subjects.  It is one thing to memorize what others have concluded and reflect over it.  It is another thing to find things out from scratch.  The later I don’t make any claims of.

Uploaded on the 20th of January 2023.