2011-03-08
Explanation
This comic presents a single graph titled "Everything Wrong with Political Discourse in One Graph." The x-axis represents knowledge and the y-axis represents confidence in one's own viewpoints. The curve shows that confidence starts high with very little knowledge, drops dramatically as a person learns more (reaching a minimum), and then very slowly climbs back up as knowledge increases further. A vertical dashed red line marks "maximum knowledge obtainable in a human lifespan," which falls well before confidence has recovered to its initial peak.
The joke is a riff on the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the well-documented cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or competence in a given area tend to greatly overestimate their own abilities, while those who are more knowledgeable become increasingly aware of how much they don't know and lose confidence. The comic suggests that political discourse is broken because the most vocal and confident participants are the least informed, while those who have actually studied the issues deeply are too uncertain to speak with the same conviction.
The additional twist is the red line showing that even a full human lifespan of learning is not enough to reach the point where high knowledge restores high confidence, implying that truly informed confidence on political matters may be essentially unattainable.