Am I a confident idiot ?

I would like to agree that I'm not a confident idiot, but by saying I'm not one….doesn't that mean I'm probably being one ?.  The article mentions that 'The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve' I'd like to believe that I know what I don’t know, for example….I don’t know anything about math, math and……..math but then again I can count to 100 and add numbers between 1-10….I mean that’s pretty impressive come on ! 

Sadly, if I were to analyse myself truthfully I most certainly am a confident idiot. In fact when I was younger, I had no problem acting like I knew everything when actually all I knew for certain was that you should never talk to strangers and not to eat food off the ground…well because that’s disgusting! Even currently I feel that I tend to overestimate my knowledge on topics that I have only touched on. But even though one is simply scraping the surface of those topics, don’t you still know something about them ? Or am I just being a confident idiot ? 

I think as human beings we stretch our knowledge because we hate the feeling of not knowing. We'd rather make something up and tell ourselves that we know everything than admit that we actually know nothing and that we are just a speck of dust in the universe. If you really think about it, if you were to disappear from the earth nothing would really change, I mean your family and friends would be affected but the world wouldn’t end just because you're gone and that fact scares people. It scares people to know just how unnoticed we actually are and somehow people just don’t want to accept that, we want the whole world to know who we are so we try to make ourselves stand out and be more superior by showing our intellect and knowledge. We are all trying to prove something…. the only problem is that everyone is ….so really  we are actually proving nothing. 

We as humans don’t like to feel insignificant and for that reason we try to show that we are important than others by saying we have all this knowledge that no one else has. All we want to do is stand out…even if that means claiming to know about the scientific concepts of 'plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine.' so yes, I most certainly am a confident idiot and so are you.

I most closely identify with the sentiment "Ignorance is bliss". I was so happy about so many things until I learned about them. Here are some examples:

1: I thought that I was eating a healthy diet. I ate lots of fresh fruit and vegetables such as tomatoes and avocados. My idea that I was eating healthfully came to an abrupt halt when a I learned about the "Eat right for your blood type diet". My blood type is O positive. I am not supposed to be eating, among other foods, avocados and tomatoes. Knowledge shattered my feeling of bliss that I was eating a healthy diet.

2: Until I was about ten, I truly believed that Santa Claus and the Easter bunny were real. It was so great to think that they brought joy to children all over the world and that Santa was always only too glad to lend a listening ear to my Christmas wishes. It was only when late one Christmas Eve when I busted by parents putting gifts under the Christmas tree (they tried to say that they were helping Santa's Elves but I did not buy it) and when I found my mother's Easter Bunny footprint maker that I learned that Santa and the Easter Bunny did not exist. It was more fun and magical when I was ignorant of this.

3: Before I knew any better, I used to love jelly worms. I loved their texture and enjoyable it was to squish them between my teeth. But then I found out that they were made out of gelatin and, even worse, I found out what gelatin is made of. According to food expert website popsugar.com, gelatin is a tasteless and odourless substance that is made up by boiling the leftovers of meat processors: skin, cartilage and bones from animals. Yuk! Once I knew what jelly worms are made of, I could no longer eat them. I was much happier not knowing! 

TED talk reflection

 what are Shermer's primary claims?

• We have a tendency to see faces
• Humans are pattern seeking
• Auditory allusions - people hear what they want to hear

which real-life situations/examples did you find most powerful in terms of illustrating these claims?

• The face on mars.

In 1976 there was a large movement for NASA to photograph an area of the moon as people thought it was a piece of architecture made by extra-terrestrial life forms, when actually it was just a mound with protruding parts making it appear as a face

• The Virgin Mary in Clearwater Florida.

The silhouette of the Virgin Mary appeared to be on the side of the building. Many people of the religious community came to see this holy sight . Thousands of candles were laid out in front of the building and lit in tribute of the Virgin Mary. After an investigation of the building, Shermer, Dawkins and Randi concluded that wherever there was a palm tree and sprinkler, the image would appear

• Film white noise with Michael Keaton about the dead talking back. Supposedly there is a hidden demonic message in the song 'stairway to heaven'. Shermer plays a snippet of the song. The songs reads:

Keaton then plays the snippet backwards without displaying the words of the reversed version, the only clear word that can be hear is 'Satan'. He then plays it again, displaying the 'supposed' massage:

Now that the audience can see the words that they are supposed to hear, the words can be heard clearly. 

which areas of knowledge were the real-life situations/examples primarily drawn from?

• Our search for meaning in terms of not being the only intelligent life form in the galaxy and that intelligent life would 'resemble us'
• Religious knowledge: In the Christian faith the Virgin Mary  is and always has been a symbol of hope.
• The belief that evil exists and the belief that everything has a deeper meaning.

do you agree or disagree with Shermer's primary claims and why?

Yes I definitely agree with Shermer's claims

According to research, one reason could just be that we see so many faces in our day-to-day lives, we’re expecting to see them everywhere. 

“Starting from childhood, they are the most common stimuli that we encounter in everyday life,” There could also be deeper, evolutionary reasons for why we are especially prone to see faces. Human survival depends so heavily on others – whether we need their help,

Other research suggests that the brain, being hard-wired to understand people and their motivations, tries to look for human-like intention in everything around us. In a bid to make sense of our fears, we begin to personify them, filling the world with gods and demons.

Interesting study that contributes to this:

A study was done on the appearance of cars, these two images were shown

Two groups of people were asked; Europeans and Ethiopians. The Ethiopian group had never seen any Disney movies about cars yet both groups' results were the same. The top car looks like a happy face and that cars with big windscreen, round headlights and a small grill tend to be considered young and feminine while the second car appeared to be angry and that cars with flatter headlights and a bigger, squarer under-body are older and more masculine.

From the moment of birth, the brain is trained to search for and recognise patterns. We are always looking for patterns and then connect a meaning to it. For example: putting a bird in a box with two buttons, after pecking each one it receives a treat. It does that again and gets another. The bird now associates that sequence with getting food so it will continue this pattern.  Humans are the same, in fact, it is highly unlikely that baby will reply/react without a goofy grin from a human. The brain has no restrictions on this pattern seeking, it sees patterns where there is almost no information to present one, and it sees patterns when there are not any, palm reading, for instance. In his book “ How we Believe” Michael Shermer argues that human brains are belief engines- kind of pattern recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that they see, observe and come across in nature.

The brain can be fooled by the ears just as it can be fooled by the eyes. The main difference is, we're quicker to realise that our eyes are fooling us. Humans hear what they want to hear or what they think they are hearing. An experiment was done to prove this: a man was filmed saying the word 'bar, bar, bar'. He then says 'far, far, far' In fact the audio didn’t change between the two takes. In the second he was silently saying 'far, far, far' but the word 'bar' was being played. Because he make the 'f'  sound with his lips we heard 'far'. The clip then plays the two next to each other. Depending on the one you look at is the thing your hear. It shows that we hear what we think we are hearing and seeing. 

 <http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-science-of-audio-illusions-or-fooling-peoples-ear-1530377318>

<http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140730-why-do-we-see-faces-in-objects>

<https://www.quora.com/What-does-this-quote-mean-Humans-are-pattern-seeking-animals-and-we-are-adept-at-finding-patterns-whether-they-exist-or-not%E2%80%9D>
 <http://matus1976.com/science/pattern_seeking/page1.htm>