Patrick’s Rants

A few years ago there was a fairly popular song where a comedian stated that stupid people should have to wear signs. That way you wouldn’t ‘rely on them’. There are even web sites such as this one. Unfortunatly, stupid people don’t know they are stupid. Imagine that. There’s a study that actually proves this point.

“Abstract
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

Phew- what a mouthfull. The whole report is quite long read it at the risk of boredom. Funny, I discovered people I know in this report.
The problem is being blessed with a modicum of intelligence.
Blatant examples:

• Reading web pages on the internet is frustrating. Spell check seems to be nearly nonexistant, grammar is poor and punctuation is atrocious.
• A friend of mine gets mail from a local business. The business is purported to be a professional company- meaning it is made up of professionals. Despite this fact, there are tons of grammatical errors such as “could of” instead of “could’ve”. The first… well I know what they meant which is really the second “could have”. Improper words are used- sure they’re spelled correctly, but they don’t mean anything near what they thought they wrote. Also the business uses a database for mailings. The business has no idea how the name came to be in the database (I know this because my friend has not used their services and I know how the name got into the database), they have never met, don’t travel in the same circles and my friend has a certain animosity for the business (I won’t get into why) yet the business addresses their letters to “Dear friend”.
• Improper use of quotes. Generally, using quotes would tend to mean either that I am taking something directly from another context like my previous point, “Dear friend” is the exact quote from the letter, or that I am using it to not really mean what is written. If the letter was addressed “Dear” friend it might be implied that the word “Dear” is not really meant to be endearment. Similarly addressing it as Dear “friend” would tend to imply that this person is not really a friend.
• Semi-knowlegable people or even those who might be considered experts in their own field of training, who think their expertise in one area makes them an expert in others. These are the type of people who will take phrases or terminology from their own field and try to apply it is some other field in order to make themselves seem more important or knowlegable. I wish I could give an example without being so specific that someone thinks it’s about them.
• Even worse is the perception by the public regarding professions. I happen to be an EA, but most people describe me as their “accountant”. The AICPA has been extremely effective in their advertising. Here’s a secret though, not all accountants are tax professionals and certainly not all tax professionals have the letters CPA after their name- I don’t. Another example is attorneys. Most attorneys specialize in a particular field whether it is civil litigation, criminal defense, prosecutors, etc. Within each field there are specialties as well- some criminal defense attorneys only work in DUI cases. You certainly don’t want a civil or bankruptcy specialist defending you in a criminal case.