The Idolatry of the Plausible
A midwit might be described as someone who is smart enough to understand the basics of a relatively complex issue without being smart enough to understand its intricacies or consequences. Essentially, such a person occupies the peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve, where the ratio of confidence to experience is at its highest.
The most obvious problem a midwit poses is the result of a kind of intellectual arrogance: that his simple understanding of any issue is in fact a complete understanding and therefore he is perfectly entitled to act upon that simple understanding without further consideration of its consequences.
More deeply though, the midwit, by his nature, tends not to be interested in complicated theories whose framework contains many caveats and exceptions which must always be weighed against the general theory. Much like the dorm-room sophomore, subjects that require the juggling second and third order effects along with the first order ones hold no interest. He instead is often drawn to those ideas that are plausible to him at first sight.
Once a plausible idea is embraced by the midwit, the problem is then compounded by ego: a sense that this simple worldview has to be comprehensive because it's obvious to him. This, in turn, leads to a kind of idolatry, one in which the idea is embraced with quasi-religious fervor. This often then accompanied by self-apotheosis in which he believes his faith in this worldview numbers him among the elect and therefore gives him essentially the divine right to impose his ideas on others.
This, then, leads to the final peril of midwittery. This idolatry of the plausible in its ultimate stages becomes dogmatic. Any evidence to flaws or errors in his rudimentary understanding of the world amounts to heresy and must be ignored or discounted. Those who disagree are not merely wrong, they're evil and must be destroyed.
There are lots of examples of this, perhaps the most striking of which is Marxism. The evidence is overwhelming that it is a flawed theory of economics, politics, and human nature. But it is an idea that refuses to die, despite the historical evidence, largely because so many midwits invest so much time and effort in propounding and propagating the idea. A more recent example is the idea that we can end the pandemic by universal vaccination, an idea that expert epidemiologists and Nobel prize winning immunologists discount as ludicrous.
So, what is the cure to midwittery? Humility. It's the realization that the world is more complicated than it first appears. That any idea or theory must be weighed not merely by the evidence, but also by the witness of history and the intellectual traditions that have been honed by it. If such a cure cannot be found, then we are indeed in danger of the fall before which pride goeth.
https://gab.com/ShemNehm/posts/107679453997610525