This article says that incompetent people don’t realize it.
I often fantasize about selecting people for a space colony. I’d already come to the conclusion you pick the best and the brightest all things being equal. And there are a lot of people in the world who don’t qualify. But I’m wary of deciding other people are stupid. I fear I’m just being egotistical. But I have to say this article gives me hope because of that very fear:
I wonder if a competency test could be developed based on this study.
A parenting aside related to this. My kids like to make up jokes. They’ve been doing it since they were around 5. Mostly these jokes don’t work. I used to laugh politely at them as an encouragement. Then I started thinking, “How do you know something is funny?” because people laugh at it. And I was laughing at stuff that wasn’t funny. So they weren’t getting any better at joke creation because they didn’t have good data. So now I don’t laugh, but still encourage them in other ways.