Simba
Social media promised us the democratization of knowledge. What we got instead was a platform where any confident idiot can lecture the world’s foremost experts on their own inventions and face zero consequences. When someone on X told Grady Booch—the literal inventor of Unified Modeling Language—that he doesn’t know anything about UML, it wasn’t a bug in the system. It was the system working exactly as designed: prioritizing engagement over accuracy, volume over expertise, and confident stupidity over informed discourse.
The Investigation: When Idiots Meet Algorithms
Grady Booch isn’t some random tech bro with opinions. He created UML in the 1990s alongside James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson. UML became the industry standard for software design visualization, taught in every computer science program worth attending. Booch is a Chief Scientist Emeritus at IBM Research, a Fellow of the ACM, and has more software architecture credibility in his thumbnail than most engineers accumulate in a career.
Many moons ago (which feels like hours ago on social media), Booch posted about the need for a standard way of visualizing LLM architecture and activity—a reasonable observation from someone whose entire career has been about creating visualization standards. Enter the Confident Idiot, stage left. Someone replied: “If you knew anything about UML, you’d already know there is a way of doing this.”
READ THAT AGAIN!
Someone told the creator of UML that he doesn’t understand UML. It’s the equivalent of explaining photosynthesis to a tree, or mansplaining gravity to Isaac Newton’s corpse. The sheer audacity is almost impressive—if it weren’t so perfectly emblematic of social media’s core dysfunction.
This incident wasn’t an isolated glitch. It represents the fundamental architecture of modern social media platforms. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and their algorithmic siblings don’t optimize for truth or expertise. They optimize for engagement. And nothing drives engagement quite like a confident moron picking a fight with someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
The numbers tell the story. A well-researched, nuanced post from an expert typically generates modest engagement—a few hundred likes, maybe a couple thoughtful replies. But a confidently wrong hot take? That’s algorithmic gold. It sparks outrage, generates quote-tweets, drives arguments that span days. The algorithm sees engagement metrics spiking and thinks, “This is what the people want!” So it amplifies the stupidity, rewards the Confident Idiot with visibility, and the cycle continues.
The Absurdity: The Bottomless Pit of Zero Consequences
The old editorial model had guardrails. If you wanted to publish an opinion in a newspaper, you submitted it to an editor. That editor had professional standards, institutional reputation to protect, and the power to reject your nonsense. If you wrote a letter claiming that gravity was a hoax perpetuated by Big Shoe, the editor would politely decline to publish it. The garbage disposal of editorial discretion filtered out the worst takes before they reached public consumption.
Social media eliminated those guardrails and called it “democratization.” Now anyone can broadcast any opinion to millions, regardless of expertise, accuracy, or basic competence. And crucially, there are no consequences for being catastrophically wrong.
You can tell a world-renowned expert they don’t understand their own field, get thoroughly ratioed, and simply… move on. Post something else tomorrow. The platform doesn’t penalize you. Your follower count might even increase from the engagement. As one software engineer described it: “Social media is a bottomless pit. You can post absolute nonsense and just get on with life as if nothing ever happened. There’s no bottom, no accountability, no learning. Just an endless scroll to the next dopamine hit.”
The Confident Idiot who lectured Booch probably didn’t learn anything from the experience. They didn’t issue a correction or acknowledge the embarrassment of confidently explaining UML to its creator. They likely just scrolled on, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow brings fresh opportunities to be wrong about different things.
This creates a perverse dynamic where expertise becomes a liability. Actual experts hedge their statements with nuance, acknowledge limitations, and speak with appropriate uncertainty. The Confident Idiot has no such constraints. They deliver their takes with the unwavering certainty of someone who skimmed a Medium article once and now considers themselves an authority.
The algorithm can’t distinguish between confidence and competence. It just measures engagement. So it rewards the Confident Idiot’s viral wrongness while the expert’s careful analysis languishes in obscurity. The marketplace of ideas has been replaced by an attention economy where the loudest voice wins, regardless of whether they have any idea what they’re talking about.
The Judgment: The Engagement Economy Rewards Stupidity
Social media platforms aren’t neutral infrastructure. They’re engagement maximization engines with a user interface. Every algorithmic decision, every feed ranking, every notification is optimized to keep you scrolling, reacting, and arguing. Truth is incidental. Expertise is irrelevant. All that matters is whether content generates the emotional response that translates into engagement metrics.
The result is a system that systematically amplifies confident stupidity while marginalizing actual expertise. Experts like Booch can post genuinely valuable insights, but if those insights don’t generate controversy or emotional reaction, the algorithm deprioritizes them. Meanwhile, some random person confidently contradicting the expert gets boosted because people can’t resist engaging with that level of absurdity.
This isn’t a bug—it’s the core business model. Social media companies monetize attention. Stupid arguments generate more attention than thoughtful discourse. Therefore, the algorithm rewards stupidity. The platforms have essentially financialized the Dunning-Kruger effect, turning human cognitive bias into quarterly earnings.
The most damning aspect is the zero-consequence environment. In the pre-social media era, if you publicly embarrassed yourself by contradicting an expert in their own field, there were social costs. Reputation damage. Professional consequences. Actual accountability. Now? You just scroll on. The bottomless pit of social media swallows every bad take, every embarrassing moment, every confident display of ignorance. Tomorrow brings a fresh feed, and nobody remembers yesterday’s debacle.
We were promised democratized knowledge. We got a system where the least informed voices can drown out the most expert ones, as long as they’re confident enough and the algorithm finds them sufficiently engaging. The marketplace of ideas has been optimized for volume, not value.
Have you ever watched an actual expert get confidently corrected by someone who clearly has no idea what they’re talking about? What’s your most absurd example of the Dunning-Kruger effect running wild on social media? Does anyone still believe these platforms are making us smarter?
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