There’s a popular quote circulating on Facebook, gaining acceptance from socialists and those who believe they are extra special, in their own way.
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Not Einstein
Before looking at these two sentences in greater detail, let’s put the attribution to Einstein to bed.
Albert Einstein did not say this, nor would anybody who knew him, studied his work, or understands what is being said, attribute this to Einstein. But by lending such a famous name, widely accepted as genius personified to something simple will naturally give it credence, sadly to the masses.
Back to the social media juggernaut of truth, justice and the resource of intellectual knowledge the masses have raced downwards to feast upon. “But I read it on Facebook, and it had 102k shares and 50k likes, so it must be true”.
The quote is used repeatedly to explain how you should not be narrow in your evaluation of the intelligence (or skills, abilities) of other people. That everyone is uniquely special, and have a different skill set to you, but are still worthy of being accepted as a genius, because those different skills are not lesser in any way to the skills displayed by people such as Mozart, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci or indeed Einstein, to whom this quote is falsely attributed to.
If instead of the first sentence saying, “Everyone is a genius”, it said ‘Everyone has something they are good at’, well that may be true, but to suggest everyone is a genius is just flat out objectively wrong.
Now let’s examine the second sentence. “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”.
If read literally, the sentence is cruel.
The first part says that you, the reader, are judging the fish, but second part says that based on the judgement of the observer the fish will believe it is stupid. There’s an obvious disconnect.
The observer makes a judgement about the ability of the fish to climb a tree. Presumably, the observer believes the fish does not have enough intelligence to climb a tree, an erroneous assumption based on the information provided.
However, regardless of what the observer thinks of the fish, why does the fish think itself stupid?
Should the fish care what anyone thinks of his/her actions?
Well the fish is stupid because it should know what limitations it has intuitively, without the need for proof.
The ‘power of positive thinking’ and ‘not knowing whether you can until you try’, along with many other self-help platitudes aside, no matter how much you may want to do something, you will never be able to overcome biological constraints.
Just as most humans will never be able to slam-dunk a basketball from the key like Michael Jordan, most humans don’t have the intellectual capacity to be able to understand Einstein’s theory of General or Special Relativity.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
It was first described by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in 1999. The opposite effect is seen for high performers, that is their tendency to underestimate their skills.
There is a distinct correlation between subjective and objective ability with people of limited competence and display a tendency to recant anecdotal evidence as justification too.
Regardless of the field in question, the metacognitive ignorance often linked to the Dunning–Kruger effect inhibits low performers from improving themselves.
Since they are unaware of their limitations, they have no motivation to address and overcome them.
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