I suspect there are fundamental reasons for Dunning-Kruger not touched upon in this article, which tacitly seems to assume that people pass through at least a couple of the four phases outlined. In reality, I suspect most people remain firmly in the first phase, convinced (like the mindless whining creature Trump) that they are "smart and stable geniuses" precisely because they are irredeemably stupid.

It is, however, the fate of nearly all mankind to be this way, because for the vast majority of our long evolutionary history calories were scarce and uncertain. Conserving energy therefore was a great survival strategy. Mental indolence conserves around 30% of the body's blood glucose, which more often was needed to power muscles in the search for food or in flight from potential sources of harm.

Moreover, our brains needed only to be "good enough" for the relatively simple challenges of the African savanna and the primordial forests of Eurasia. Anything beyond that was evolutionarily pointless. And so our brains are extremely limited in what tasks they can perform precisely because there was, for 99.99% of our evolutionary history, no requirement for them to be capable of anything more.

For reasons we still do not understand, a tiny percentage of people are clever, and a small percentage of these clever people go on to invent astonishing technologies. But everyone else is simply an ape stroking a smartphone with precisely zero comprehension of how any of it really works, nor how it came to be.

Dunning-Kruger thus defines our species, and always will.