Resolves YES if no examples of this observation occur prior to 1670
Otherwise, 1/N based on number of early thinkers incl. Pascal who noticed midwittery:
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ14 | |
| 2 | Ṁ3 | |
| 3 | Ṁ0 | |
| 4 | Ṁ0 |
I reviewed the quotes provided by @Rodeo and I think the Montaigne one counts and I'm not quite as happy about the Bacon one so let's count that as a half.
So I'll resolve to 1 / 2.5 => 40%.
If you're really extremely super fired up about this and think I've made a terrible mistake, try to make a clear argument about the passages already provided and any moderator or myself would probably revisit this if you do it within 48 hours.
Montaigne's Essays, 1570, talks about how "erroneous opinions" arise in the "middle range of mental vigour and capacity" (!). It's about as midwit meme as you can possibly get:
"Out of simple minds, less enquiring and less educated, are made good Christians, who through reverence and obedience believe simply and live under the laws. In the middle range of mental vigour and capacity, erroneous opinions arise; they follow the apparent truth of their first impressions; and they do have a case for thinking that those of us who stay with the old ways—not having been instructed in such matters by study—are stuck in them by simple-mindedness and stupidity. Great minds, more settled and clear-sighted, form another category of good believers; by long and religious investigation they come to have a deeper and more complex grasp of the Scriptures, and to sense the mysterious and divine secret of our ecclesiastical polity.”
“It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity”
-Francis Bacon, "Of Atheism" 1601
https://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/bacon.html#16
that's the most famous bit from the essay, but there's another even more midwit-meme expression later:
..."against atheists, the very savages take part, with the very subtlest philosophers"
Resolves YES if no examples of this observation occur prior to 1670
This market resolves based on whether there are examples found & provided to this market (& does not require us to evaluate the actual truth of the matter). Thus, I'll give it 48 hours for folks here to provide additional examples or I (or mods) will resolve YES.
(I don't think the example below counts.)
Plato's Socrates is very reminiscent of this, isn't he? His whole shtick is essentially insisting that he's a person of the sort we'd put on the left side of the curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing gives as illustration a quote from the Apology:
"I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either", also translated as "[...] I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know."
It isn't carved the same way as in the Pascal quote so it may not fully count—though someone might make a better case that it does—but in contrast to knowing, there's definitely 'doesn't know but thinks he knows' (your midwit) and 'doesn't know and doesn't think he knows' (himself).