Roger Bacon on Obstacles to Wisdom
He is right, although there might well be more than four:
Quatuor vero sunt maxima comprehendendæ veritatis offendicula, quæ omnem quemcumque sapientem impediunt, et vix aliquem permittunt ad verum titulum sapientiæ pervenire: videlicet fragilis et indignæ auctoritatis exemplum, consuetudinis diuturnitas, vulgi sensus imperiti, et propriæ ignorantiæ occultatio cum ostentatione sapientiæ apparentis. (Opus Maius, Part 1, Chapter 1)
Here’s a rough translation into English:
There are four significant obstacles to the acquisition of wisdom and truth: submission to faulty and unworthy authority; the distracting and unreliable influence of custom; the opinion of the ignorant masses; and the propensity of humans for disguising ignorance by the display of psuedo-wisdom.
My short commentary: the first obstacle is a fallacy in its own right, namely, the appeal to irrelevant authority; the second and third obstacles show up in fallacies such as ad populum and bandwagon; something like the fourth obstacle is present in the Dunning-Kruger Effect, though this is not necessarily a matter of trying to disguise ignorance by displaying false wisdom. The D-K bias might be an unintentional result of lack of self-knowlege.
It is a thorny part of the human predicament that we ought to be wise, we need wisdom, our want of it is an aspect of our existential mess, and yet few seek it while many fake it to hide their lack of it.