[[folder:Real Life]]
* '''Please keep in mind the RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment when adding RealLife Examples.'''
** To get it out of the way, any hot-button issue will attract this trope, as most people will have strong opinions, but not everyone is well-informed.
* a common cliche in World War 2 PoW books, often reported a verbatim by an eyewitness - in TheGreatEscape original book, for one. Usually involves a German middle-ranking officer exclaiming "you think I know damn nothing, I tell you I know DAMN ALL" without being aware of the idiomatic meaning
* Comment threads for any political blog or news story are littered with {{Know Nothing Know It All}}s and OpinionMyopia. Expect to see plenty of copy-and-paste activism, long-disproved conspiracy theories, or repetition of whatever buzzword the major political parties are currently trying to spread.
* This is also known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias in which people of low competence consider themselves above average because they don't know enough about a subject to realize how little they actually know about it, while people of high competence hold themselves to a higher standard and underestimate their ability.
** The LiesToChildren trope illustrates this nicely with regard to the sciences. After secondary/high school, what you've been taught probably appears to explain much of the universe. You won't learn just how wrong the things you've been taught are unless you go on to study at university level.
* Inverted heavily by Socrates. He claims to know nothing, but a dialogue with him will end up being about any complex philosophical matter. At least the dialogues make sense, even if Socrates was heavily into leading arguments that break themselves.
* The controversy behind ''MassEffect''. Despite never actually playing the game, blogger Kevin [=McCullough=] made such statements such as "Mass Effect can be customized to sodomise whatever, whomever, however, the game player wishes," and "with its ‘over the net’ capabilities virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away". He then hastily backtracked his position, admitting he never played the game, but still had the arrogance to claim his position still stands. Martha [=MacCullum=] then brought this "controversy" to Fox Network, and along with Cooper Lawrence, made false claims about the game being interactive porn and marketed towards children, again, despite never actually playing or seeing the game.
** Speaking of Cooper Lawrence, if you can get through all the reviews put up by sarcastic gamers who haven't read her books, you'll find reviews by people who ''did''. Hilariously, they didn't like her any more than the gamers did.
* ''NightTrap'' was a game where you are working behind the scenes of a mansion's security trap system to capture a bunch of [[OurVampiresAreDifferent ninja-looking vampires]] in hopes to get them before they get the [[DistressedDamsel girls in the slumber party]]. You're protecting both them and one of the agents undercover in this party for the entirety of the game, switching through cameras every once in a while to catch the bad guys or listen to important clues. No problems, nothing terribly explicit. However, the game was pulled off the shelves until given a higher rating by radical feminist groups because apparently they said (more or less) it was a game where you're a criminal who hijacked the house, kidnapping and raping scantily-clad teenage girls using all the elaborate traps and sex toys for the ultimate fun in serial rapist technology (never mind that, again, you're supposed to trap the ''vampires'', '''not''' the ''girls''). And the best part? They all openly admitted that they hadn't played or researched the game beyond knowing its name and probably the vaguest sense of the story. These same people, however, still act as if they know more than even the ''actors''. Yeah, great...
** This can arguably be applied to ''anyone'' ComplainingAboutShowsYouDontWatch, with bonus points going to those that protested ''{{Dogma}}'' and ''MontyPythonsLifeOfBrian''.
* So-called "Truthers", {{conspiracy theorist}}s who believe the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by the U.S. government, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Actually, most conspiracy theorists fall under this, holding fast to their illogic despite all evidence and logic. One ''NationalGeographic'' special on the moon landing conspiracies interviewed a guy running an observatory that bounced lasers off the reflectors left on the moon. He pointed out that, oddly, they've never been contacted by the theorists(''MythBusters'' visited a similar observatory in their own Moon Landing Conspiracy episode, with said observatory's representative also noting that conspiracy theorists have never tried to contact them).
** ''Zeitgeist the move''. It has been proven to contain precisely no facts whatsoever and has even been [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist:_The_Movie#Critical_reaction dubbed a propaganda film by most every official reviewer who has seen it]]....yet quite a few people still follow it blindly, including one or two who really should know better. The whole of the first film is a series of uncited 'facts' about Christianity, all of which easily debunked with the smallest amount of knowledge, research, or common sense. About the only positive thing that can be said about Zeitgeist is that it has good taste in cheap stock footage.
** Special mention must go to Rosie O'Donnell, for proclaiming on television that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the "first time in history" that fire melted steel. She neglected to explain how anyone has ever been able to make or cast steel if that's true. And the fact that the steel in the WTC never melted in the first place.
*** It was only around the 15th or 16th century that it became possible for steel to be melted down and cast; before that, it was only heated red-hot and bashed into shape. But people prior to the 1400s didn't have ''jet fuel'' in their blacksmith shops.
* [[SocialDarwinist Some]] [[ANaziByAnyOtherName single-race fanatics]] claim that eugenics, whereby a group of people characterized by genetic factors are eliminated from the population, actually improves the gene pool, and that this is spelled out in Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection. They are so confident in this belief that they are willing to ''kill huge swaths of people'' in the name of a stronger human race. This is clearly contradictory to Darwin's theories, which demonstrate that ''diversity'' is what enables a population to resist change, disease, and competition. This overlaps with CriticalResearchFailure. The people they were trying to eliminate were actually reproducing faster and, often times, moving up in society. The Aristocracy was needlessly inbred and politically faltering, making ''them'' the ones less suited to their environment. What they advocated was less like natural selection and more like artificially breeding nervous show poodles.
* UweBoll: "I'm the only fucking genius in the entire industry."
* NassimHaramein. He believes (or claims to believe) to have figured out ''unified field theory'' - among other things. He makes money selling [=DVDs=] with his "theories" - actually they make quite good comedic material if you have some basic knowledge of physics - but they're ignored by the scientific community.
* That note about [[CalvinAndHobbes Calvin's dad]] up there? Dig up one of your relatives in the right age range and try it some time. It is ''fun''.
* A variant occurs on medical websites such as [=WebMD=]. While those who contribute to the site's article and health databases have some knowledge of medicine and illness, the average user doesn't. This won't stop visitors from self-diagnosing themselves, despite proper diagnosis being a major aspect of professional medical education. Worse yet, a growing number of people are applying this approach to their mental health, especially using the vague descriptors for Asperger's Syndrome as a convenient red herring for simple, everyday depression, anxiety, and antisocial tendencies. Not only does act as an excuse for individuals not to see qualified therapist or psychiatrist, but it erodes the reputation of Asperger's as an actual disorder, and further stigmatizes those who actually suffer from it. Other self-diagnoses stem from popular medical shows, such as ''Series/{{House}}''.
** Similarly, there is a saying among psychologists that every Psych 101 student will, between the first and last day of the course, diagnose himself with half the conditions mentioned in the textbook.
* ''Very'' common amongst so-called (and often self-described) "experts" in sports journalism. Their analysis tends to be a mixture of opinion no more founded in factual evidence than any two morons arguing in a bar, and for all their alleged insider knowledge, the average fan tends to be [[http://forums.footballnation.com/showthread.php/1225 at least as apt to correctly predict the outcome of a sporting event as someone who is paid to be an 'expert']].
** Most of the big name sports "analysts" (such as Stephen A. Smith, Skip Bayless, and Charles Barkley) aren't on TV because of their sports insight (or lack thereof). They get shown on TV because they're either a former famous athlete, or have on-screen charisma. Their "analysis" of players often come from reading box scores or seeing highlights of big market teams. 
* Website/YouTube comments, aside from their reputation for stupidity, also have a not-quite-as-noticeable trend of people with no apparent idea what they're talking about claiming unreasonable extremes of certainty on various subjects.
** An especially obvious subset is in the comments to videos of angry pet animals like dogs or cats; often times people will claim to "know" that the animal in a given video has been abused, based on reasoning that does not necessarily imply abuse. Any animal that is taped performing a trick, no matter how innocent, is also frequently accused as having been abused as well. Apparently, the only way to train an animal's behavior is to simply beat it until it complies, the entire well-established concept of positive reinforcement being wholly ignored as a possibility. This further assumes they aren't claiming that simply teaching an animal to do tricks is abuse in and of itself because it's not "natural". At it's absolute lowest, footage shot of ''real'' animals in the ''wild'' doing something common such as fighting amongst themselves for dominance is decried as abuse, with the clueless wondering aloud what kind of sick person taught those innocent creatures to do such things to each other!
** Similarly, people who shoot footage of predators catching prey in the wild will often be accused of various moral deficiencies for doing nothing to "help" the prey escape and just "standing there" while, you know, ''nature'' takes it's course. 
*** There are also users who try to diagnose diseases like rabies on certain animals that are acting "strange". For example, the featured video [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ikm3o5hDks Rat Loves Cat]] has many cynical comments saying that the [pet] rat's behavior is the result of toxoplasmosis. Then there's [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU4-t5lTsNs another video]] with a rat snapping at cats to keep them away. The comments are also saying the rat has toxoplasmosis, even though it's doing the ''exact opposite''. [[note]]For a possible explanation, the rat in the first video is domesticated and, infected or not, didn't understand that the cat was potentially dangerous. A well-fed cat will usually not kill prey with [[http://youtu.be/Nq1TusgAIqM no "fear scent"]]. In the second video, the rat was just defending herself, as a healthy prey animal should.[[/note]]
** Quite hilariously, pick a video about a particular type of gun, then read how many comments about ''CallOfDuty'' appear with contradictory stats on the weapon [[ArmchairMilitary based on their experiences from the games]].
* Many reviewers tend to know less about their review subject as you'd expect them to.
* Political and social issues (as well as scientific ones, when they heavily interact with politics and society) tend to attract these sorts. Often, the louder advocates of a particular point of view or course of action have only picked up a confused and incomplete understanding of the issue. Such people can [[DontShootTheMessage drown out their own side]] while providing easy, I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-{{strawman}} targets for their opponents.
* The word "sophomoric" has the same meaning as this trope, based on a common perception of sophomores (a term for second-year students in the U.S.). This stems from a popular myth that "sophomore" originates from the Greek terms "sophos" (wise) and "moros" (foolish), though evidence suggests there is no relation to the latter.
* Dumb computer users who try to solve a computer related problem themselves (with "solutions" that either do nothing, or make things worse), especially when [[StopHelpingMe someone tries to help them]], with many amusing or outright absurd examples from the [[http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ Rinkworks Computer Stupidities]] website.
** A usability [[http://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html study]] that included self-identified "power users":
-->Power users ignored the instructions, scrolled far enough down to fully reveal the Next button, then left the page with the window tiny and off-center. They would then spend the next twenty minutes attempting to use the application with most of each page out of view.
* Numerous leaders like Mao Zedong, tend to implement massive economic plans and projects which they believe would increase production of their countries, and generate more food/wealth. But most of the time their plans instead are actually inefficient to useless, as they ended up spending massive amounts of resources and manpower only to generate very little useful products than to what they predicted, and only created poverty and starvation.
* Amateur reviewers of restaurants on sites like Yelp often come across as this.
* One of the side-stories coming out of the 2012 US elections was the conflict between Washington insider political pundits and people conducting statistical analysis of polling data in predicting election results. By a wide margin, the pundits, who relied on "insider knowledge", "experience", and close contacts with the political establishment, failed miserably in the accuracy of their prediction, while the statisticians were on the ball. Analysis of the pundits' past predictions, not just those involving elections, have shown that their self-proclaimed vast experience and knowledge is usually no more accurate than flipping a coin.
* Many writers in video game journalism come off as this. The reason is often because people who are knowledgeable about game design or the game industry have more lucrative jobs, and most competent journalists have better-paying opportunities writing about other subjects. Some of the worst examples include the writers of Kotaku, GameTrailers, IGN, Game Informer, Jim Sterling of Destructoid, and The Escapist Magazine.
** Video game players and enthusiasts alike also tend to fall under this trope as well. You can see this trope in full force within game based forums as people get into heated debates over games or specific aspects of games. More often than not, the people arguing intensely usually have little knowledge in the subject matter.
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