Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low knowledge or ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this knowledge or ability.
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| JK Adams |
I follow JK Adams Photo on FaceBook. Kyle, for lack of a better characterization, specializes in shooting The Blue Angels. He does photograph other subjects, but his work with The Blues is some of the most exceptional aviation photography I've ever seen, and I've been shooting SLRs for almost 45 years and infatuated with airplanes for a bit longer. The photographs in this post are all his, lifted directly from his FB page. If you want to see his best work, check out his
website. As a matter of fact, visiting his site will make this story much more relatable. I deliberately selected images that help tell the story but mitigate the opportunity for anyone to pirate them. I haven't met Kyle in person, but we interact a bit on his FB page, and those interactions have steadily been more and more around the trolls who pop in and tell Kyle that he didn't do what he did, or he didn't see what he saw, or his images are the product of some "lousy" AI or Photoshop trickery.
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| ©JK Adams |
These people are all so confident in their ignorance it has become laughable. It has become so routine that I will often toss in a sarcastic comment along the lines of "Wait - no one has made the obligatory 'Obviously AI' post yet!" before the trolls even have a fair chance to crawl out from under their bridge. These people don't understand shockwaves, atmospheric conditions, or basic physics – much less precision flying. They've never seen a flight team perform, but they know more about jets and flight demonstrations than any #1 pilot could ever dream of.
But these keyboard warriors are so severely infected with Dunning-Kruger they will insist that everyone else (even the people who have flown the F/A-18) have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. They'll deny that the jets are flying as close to each other as they are, so they insist the photos are "obviously" doctored.
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| ©JK Adams |
It's my impression that if The Blues are flying in Pensacola, he's shooting. I couldn't begin to estimate the number of times he sees them fly every season. It appears that he often gets to know the solo pilots, and meets them a couple of times during the season. He shoots video and stills, and gets direct information from the announcers (and, this is my assumption – a live feed from the radio traffic, based on some of his statements.) His sources are as primary as primary can possibly be. I've seen them perform no less than five times, and I've seen The Thunderbirds at least four times. I've seen the Frecce Tricolori practice over Rome and watched more documentaries and videos of demonstration teams than I can count. Nothing that Kyle posts raises an eyebrow, it's all perfectly plausible to those who have a reasonable understanding of the subject.
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| ©JK Adams |
While this particular instance is more entertaining than anything else, the pervasiveness of Dunning-Kruger in modern society is a highly corrosive phenomenon. People who barely graduated high school are under the impression that they are experts on international trade and the economic impact of tariffs. Others, who lack the fundamental ability to treat a fever, think they have mastered epidemiology and immunology to the point that they can determine the need for immunizations. Twenty five years ago, when discussing online securities trading, I made the comment that the acceleration of information was not going to benefit society, because people were making decisions based on information that they did not understand. The problem has only been exacerbated over the years, thanks to that information moving from the desktop to our palms. The number of people who lack the ability to parse and process contradictory data is shocking, and instead of trying to understand the data, they simply discard whatever doesn't confirm their bias; Dunning-Kruger marches on.
