this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Is the Dunning-Krugger effect mainly displayed by low education people?
In my own personal experience pretty much everybody displays that in areas outside their expertise, and I definitely include myself in this.
For example the phenomenon of people offering what basically amounts to Medical advice is incredibly common outside the Medical profession - pretty much every-fucking-body will offer you some suggestion if you say you're feeling like you have a bit of a temperature or something generic like that.
It's also my experience that highly educated people don't have any greater introspection abilities than the rest (i.e. for self-analysis and self-criticism) or empathy (to spot when other people feel that you're talking of your ass).
Maybe it's the environment I grew in, or the degrees I learned and professional occupations I had (so, Physics, Electronics Engineering, Software Engineering) that are too limited to make a judgement, maybe it's me showing my own Dunning-Kruger effect or maybe my observations are actually representative and reasonably correct: whichever way, my 2c is that learned people are no better at the adult mature skills (such as introspection and empathy) than the rest, something which also matches with my experience that the Education System (at least were I studied, Portugal of the 80s and 90s) doesn't at all teach those personal skills.
So IMHO, your assumption that the majority of those people have low education is probably incorrect, unless you're anchoring that on the statistic that most human beings on Planet Earth have low education, in which case they're certainly the majority of the confidently incorrect even if they're no more likely to be so than the rest simply because there's more of them than of the rest.
PS: Also note that amongst highly educated people there are people from different areas which emphasize different modes of thinking. My impression is that whilst STEM areas tend to emphasize analytical thinking, objectivity, assumption validation and precision, other areas actually require people to in many ways have a different relationship with objective reality (basically anything in which you're supposed to persuade others).
That's a very diplomatic way to describe politicians and business professionals