http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool - shun him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple - teach him.
He who knows and knows not he knows: he is asleep - wake him.
He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise - follow him.

He who is ignorant can be taught.
(def: lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated.)

He who is stupid lacks the intelligence to understand, and therefor cannot be taught. (def: lacking intelligence or common sense.)

How can I show this to my neighbours and make them understand it?Timeline of this weekend - we saw some of them dressed to the nines getting into a stretched limo on Friday.

On Saturday they (as normally) loudly discussed how the person they saw could have performed for 5 more minutes whilst simultaneously stating how this performer had proven Michael Jackson's saintliness because said MJ had stayed with the performer for 4 days.

It's worth noting at this point all we knew was they went out somewhere in a stretched limo and saw someone who had MJ to visit for 4 days.

On the Sunday the normal loud talking over our fence lead to the discovery that not only did my neighbors take a stretched limo to arrive at a Michael Flatley concert. They couldn't recall the name of the long haired blonde peado with a cigar (it was Jimmy Saville - most prolific sexual predator in history) or as they roundly called him "that Australian dude" (Rolf Harris - more cherished, like painted the queens portrait, but still sent down for being a peed).

So the outcome of this is my neighbors who have a very small 4 bed house (would be 3 except they opened the loft), own 9 cars, have a 32, 26 and 18 year old still living at home. They hire a stretched limo so they go an see Michael Flatley perform live then come home and discuss loudly how Michael Jackson was obviously a good person because he stayed with Michael Flatley. Shortly afterwards they then totally struggled to remember the names of the biggest sex offender ever known in the uk and the most treasured letdown of all time.

This is almost par with them discussing a new flavor of chips/crisps for 45 min or that time 4 of them tried to count the same amount of change for >20 mins and none of them could agree the same amount.

Sorry had to rant - I'd love to confront them over the noise/cars/stupidity etc but I'm a mildly tough 40 year old. Their highly violent and the 26 year is a goddamn cagefighter.

I honestly can't vent enough - literally I could write a novel on how much my neighbors suck. Just as a final point to carry things across - I recently needed to cut back some ivy in my backgarden. During the hour this took they played Natasha Beddingfield's "These Words" 5 times. Yes I'm a Maggot, Yes I'm a 40 year old who probably needs to stop jumping into moshpits. But Natasha Beddingfield??? 5 times?? Really????

If you ever feel the need to vent about your neighbors, feel free to post it on my profile page as i find it quite entertaining.

Well... I know perfectly well that I'm not competent to be a surgeon, and that's not a consequence of my being competent to be a surgeon.

In order to know exactly how incompetent you are as a surgeon, you need to have some level of competency. If you were completely ignorant of the body, you might think you could just cut out an organ and glue someone back together. You must have some level of understanding to know you don't know enough.

I've always believed(at least for me) in the saying... The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Something like that.

What? That's not stupidity, that's delusion. I've known some people who are really stupid, but they're still not gonna go "Japanese? Yeah, I guess I could speak that... Calculus? Probably something I know how to do." There are some really dumb, incompetent, humble people out there, who assume they can't do much of anything, and some smart, overconfident people who think that whatever other people are good at, is probably easy. It's not related to their level of competence, but to whatever bullshit the world has told them about their own relative ability.

You may think that, I think in most instances it's neither only stupidity nor solely delusion, but it can be just complete ignorance. I point to miracle surgeons in South America that convince uneducated people that they can reach inside their body and pull out organs. They believe it because they don't know better and they're delusional usually. If they knew basic physiology, it would be much harder for them to delude themselves.
As to 'Another language, I can speak that.', I point to Peggy Hill (and those real people like her). With her, it's ignorance of the subject paired with ignorance of her own ability, at least as I see it.
I have actually known people who said things like 'calculus, probably something I can just do.' that quickly dropped AP calculus when they learned differently. They were completely ignorant of what it was, or the base math knowledge needed to learn it and maybe deluded about their own skills. When the ignorance was cleared up, the delusion evaporated.
My point is, delusion is far more difficult if not impossible without ignorance.
EDIT: please see above for how I see dumb and stupid as different.

The Dunning Kruger effect relates to peoples inability to assess their competence at a task they are already doing.

You might correctly assume that you can't speak Japanese or perform surgery, but once you start learning either, you will almost certainly overestimate your own ability early on.

The other thing that's important to note is that it doesn't necessarily relate to stupidity but competence. Stupidity is inherent, competence is learned. As you become more competent with a skill, you are better able to accurately rate your own ability.

In other words, even smart people will tend to overestimate their abilities until they know better.

For example, I've been aware of this phenomenon for nearly a decade. I've never driven a race car. Intellectually, I know that I'm not the next Senna in disguise, but even then I will catch myself looking at F1 or even the muppets on Top Gear and thinking "I could do that".

I disagree with this somewhat. It sounds poetic and whatnot, but contrary to your statement I still feel that understanding you know nothing at all is a sign of actual intelligence.
In the context of your post: "He who knows and knows he knows" easily applies to every fucking moron on the planet, who is convinced of their own self-righteousness.
Everyone *thinks* they 'know' to a fault. Ultimately none of us know anything, and to proceed through life with this perspective will not only let you avoid being a beacon of ignorance, but you will approach all things from the innocent perspective of wanting to learn more.

That's my philosophy anyway.

Yeah, all I'm saying is that this statement (by Cleese) is facile (and I think he'd be fine with that assessment, given he had less than a minute to make it for full impact). Most learning and motivational theory indicates a strong jump in confidence and perceived ability in the initial learning stages (even just after a few minutes, if it's a simple task) and then a sharp drop off as the cognitive effect of "I did it" reconciles with the awareness that "I don't have this skill, though." That initial boost is what we need to be a learning species.

At the same time, that effect is tempered by a host of other effects - previous experiences of other learning tasks, society's communicated expectations and obstacles (for example, I picked surgery in my example because that's been communicated to me as being difficult; I don't have the same reservations about my janitorial skills, even though that's also an area I've no experience in), and all that will play in equally or even more strongly when estimating your own ability.

What I find fascinating about the Dunning-Kruger Effect is that it implies that the root cause of an individual's stupidity (their lack of talent in a particular field) is due primarily to their refusal to acknowledge their own incompetence, rather than any particular lack of ability itself.

Which is to say: If one can not hear that they are singing out of tune, they do not see the need to correct their pitch in order to improve their singing. As far as they are concerned, they sound wonderful!

It's actually a pretty horrifying conclusion. ><