The Case for Professors of Stupidity - Facts So Romantic

In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification of Germany, the philosopher wrote "The Triumph of Stupidity," attributing the rise of Adolf Hitler to the organized fervor of stupid and brutal people--two qualities, he noted, that "usually go together." He went on to make one of his most famous observations, that the "fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Russell's quip prefigured the scientific discovery of a cognitive bias--the Dunning–Kruger effect--that has been so resonant that it has penetrated popular culture, inspiring, for example, an opera song (from Harvard's annual Ig Nobel Award Ceremony): "Some people's own incompetence somehow gives them a stupid sense that anything they do is first rate. No surprise, then, that psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger prefaced a 2008 paper she wrote with David Dunning and Justin Kruger, among others, with Russell's comment--the one he later made in his 1951 book, New ...