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POPSWhy The Loudest are Often the Most Wrong This classic paper by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments , examines the psychological reasons for the unfortunately common correlation between ignorance and confidence. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ( PDF here .)
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POPSPresidential IQ table For those who are interested, here is a table of the estimated IQs of all of the US presidents. I also placed the paper this was taken from here (PDF format). Here is what the paper said how Bush fares in terms of intelligence: "...Bush is definitely intelligent. The IQ estimates range between 111.1 and 138.5, with an average around 125. That places him in the upper range of college graduates in raw intellect. ...Bush's IQ is below average relative to that subset of the U.S. citizens who also managed to work their way into the White House. In fact his intellect falls near the bottom of the distribution...only Harding has a lower score."
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