The nature of stupidity

From John Cleese

I think the problem with people like this [he was asked about Christine O’Donnell, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck] is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. You see, if you’re very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are. There’s a wonderful bit of research by a guy named Dunning at Cornell, (who’s a friend of mine, I’m proud to say), who has pointed out that in order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. Which means, and this is terribly funny, that if you are absolutely no good at something at all, that you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely no good at it. And this explains not just Hollywood, but almost the entirety of Fox News.

I might add that the people he refers to are baseline stupid, barely sentient, but that there are higher degrees in this knightly order that are cloaked in better jargon.