The ‘Delusional Takes’ Twitter page was started up fairly recently, just half a year ago, in June 2022. However, in that time, it has managed to attract over 162.9k followers with its posts that focus on wrong opinions and arrogant social media users.

The page moderator suggests that people should unfollow the account if they’re cringe. Meanwhile, if you’ve come across an incredibly delusional take while surfing the net or scrolling through your social media feeds, you can send them a link to the post. Who knows, you might get lucky and your post might get featured. 

Reading through some of the posts that were featured on ‘Delusional Takes’ is bound to give you a heavy dose of secondhand embarrassment. Seriously, how can people be so incredibly wrong?

It’s moments like this one that remind you that common sense isn’t all that common. And that many people would rather stay comfortably within their opinion echo chambers than risk being proven wrong. What’s life worth if you don’t try to learn more about the world and instead bonk everyone on the heads if they dare disagree with you? That’s no way to live.

People who have delusional takes are prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. To put it simply, the effect means that most individuals firmly believe that they’re smarter than average. Now, obviously, that’s not how averages work. But these people think that they’re far more competent and intelligent than the rest. As a result, they see their opinions as closer to the truth than anyone else’s. Often, they’re wrong.

However, the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to experts as well. Though, slightly differently. Specialists believe that everyone else is aware of the (objectively complicated) things they know. To these experts, everything seems clear, but the general public might not understand the concept they use. Furthermore, well-educated people tend to underestimate their skills.

As a result, you have a very weirdly skewed situation where those who lack education are the most confident in their opinions. Meanwhile, those who are well-educated are too timid and far too critical of themselves. People, in general, have an extremely tough time estimating how competent they are in a given area.

There’s another issue. Repetition is something that makes people believe an opinion, even if it’s factually incorrect. The more we’re exposed to certain information, the more plausible it seems to us. And even if we’re aware of the role that repetition plays in our perception of reality doesn’t make us completely immune to it. That’s the power of fake news and propaganda.

Two ways to counter misinformation are to find reputable sources and to do a bit of background research on a ‘fact’ before retweeting or reposting someone else’s opinion. No news source is perfect; everyone makes mistakes. However, this doesn’t mean that all sources are equal. Far from it.