Allen is not some random nut job from the fringes of society. He’s a very articulate graduate of Caltech, which means he has a high degree of native intelligence. He’s in the education profession. He is on BlueSky. He goes to No Kings protests. He’s your basic rank-and-file Democrat.
But it’s that high native intellect that led him astray.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is, at its simplest level, people thinking they know more that they do. People who are high achievers in one area often mistakenly believe their native abilities make them experts in all areas.
So you get a super-smart guy like Allen, he excels in one narrow area, and extrapolates that excellence into thinking he knows more than he does in other areas. He goes into Blue Sky, he goes to No Kings protests, and he is easily swayed into believing all of the insane, violent lies those sorts of intellectual cesspools foster. All of a sudden this computer science expert is a national political policy expert too, except that latter expertise is derived from insane propaganda. The man with the intellectual skill to write code is not smart enough to recognize when he himself has fallen prey to propaganda, so he KNOWS that Donald Trump is Hitler and must be stopped.
And when you KNOW that someone is Hitler, what’s the right thing to do?
That’s what is so scary at this very moment—the sheer number of ostensibly educated Democrats who KNOW so many things are “true” that are actually so very, very untrue.
In many ways, Cole Allen is just an average Democrat, and like most average Democrats, he fell prey to credentialism and Dunning-Kruger. But Cole took it to the next level; let’s pray more do not.
………..
Imagine thinking you’re going down in history as some latter-day Brutus or John Wilkes Booth by killing the President of the United States but instead you get taken down, stripped naked, wrapped in tinfoil and the President posts pictures like this of you on his social media
I FORGOT THE ATTRIBUTION
CYNICAL PUBLIUS ( ON X )
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