One
of the best titles for a scientific paper has to be the Nobel Prize winning
"Unskilled
and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead
to inflated self-assessments". The paper compares people's skill levels
to their own assessment of their abilities. In hindsight, the result
seems self-evident. Unskilled people lack the skill to rate their own level of
competence. This leads to the unfortunate result that unskilled people rate
themselves higher than more competent people. The phenomenon is known as the
Dunning-Kruger effect, named after the paper's authors, and is often seen in the
climate debate. There are many with a cursory understanding of the subject who
believe they have discovered fundamental flaws in climate science that have
somehow been overlooked or ignored.
See this website for a good explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect: http://www.skepticalscience.com
A good current example of this effect would be Sarah
Palin. See:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6950967.ece
Or put more simply the old saying: “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”