Search Results: he said it was a mistake

I ask this because we have phenomena like the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is described as “a cognitive bias in which people with a limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their capabilities” which roughly means they’re ignorant of their own ignorance. This phenomena became coined after the psychologists Dunning and Kruger studied a man names McArthur Wheeler following the notable events of his arrest.

In 1995, Wheeler was arrested on two counts of armed robbery in which he entered 2 banks in broad daylight, his face perfectly visible to the cameras and even winking at some of them as he robbed them. When police arrived at his door to arrest him that night, he was sincerely shocked. Apparently, Wheeler believed that by covering his face in lemon juice, it would somehow make it impossible for the cameras to detect him after testing the idea with a polaroid camera. He genuinely believed lemon juice would hide his face from security cameras and kept repeating “But I wore the lemon juice” as he was arrested. He is not the first person to be effected by this phenomena as there are plenty of others who are ignorant of their own ignorance in specific fields who have made other mistakes, perhaps not as gravely as Wheeler, but certainly as embarrassing.

Knowing all of this, do you agree that knowing the extent of your own ignorance is a sign of your true intellect, as Confucius says?