University of Illinois psychology Professor Justin Kruger researched a topic painfully relevant to all of our lives: incompetence. He concluded that incompetence is bliss. “People who are unskilled in a domain,” he says, “often do not possess the metacognitive skills necessary to recognize competence.” That is, many people never truly understand what they can’t do.

I bring this up because the other day I was riding in a friend’s car when suddenly it began to shudder like one of those virtual-reality roller coasters we’ve all — oh, just admit it — ridden at the mall. Just before he picked me up, my friend said, he had taken his car to get a flat tire fixed. Well, it turns out the mechanic forgot to put the lug nuts back on; the shaking was the wheel inching its way off the axle.

I’m no car mechanic, but I know that changing a tire does not demand an astonishing amount of technical mastery — about the same amount as, say, urinating. If all men operated at the same intellectual altitude as our forgetful mechanic, they would be walking around with their penises hanging out.

Changing a tire is generally not a life-and-death situation. A low-rung mechanic at a quick-change shop — probably a teenager still drunk from the night before — isn’t necessarily as astute as a surgeon.

But mechanics aren’t the only ones who can’t put pieces back where they found them. According to a study done in part by the Harvard School of Public Health, surgical teams in the United States accidentally leave clamps, sponges and other tools inside 1,500 patients each year. Included in “other tools”: electrodes and 11-inch retractors, which are metal strips used to hold back tissue.

Let me repeat: 11-inch strips of metal at large in your body. “It happens more often to fat people,” CNN paraphrases the study, “simply because there is more room inside them to lose equipment.” Thanks, incompetence, for an incentive to lose weight.

Maybe the instruments are misplaced only by poorly trained doctors during emergency situations in desperate hospitals. Surely such medical incompetence can’t reach the upper tiers of healthcare.

Except we all know that a very elite medical institution, Duke University Hospital, recently made a tragic error that wouldn’t have stumped a pre-med student. They transplanted organs of the wrong blood type. This blunder, if you ask me, is the medical equivalent of forgetting to put the lug nuts back on.

Although Duke University Hospital is an elite institution, maybe the dodo who messed up had not been so well-trained. Someone educated at, say, Harvard, would never make such an error.

Enter Dr. David C. Arndt, 1992 graduate of Harvard Medical School. As he operated, a surgeon stepped in to hand him his paycheck. Leaving the patient gaping on the operating table, Arndt went to the bank — in Harvard Square — to cash it. He returned 35 minutes later. “A financial crisis,” he said. I’m glad the patient wasn’t fat, or the good doctor probably would have left his bankbook inside.

Moral of the story: Let’s protect one another from the incompetence of our neighbor, who, according to Kruger, is probably unable to perceive it.

Because the kind of well-placed incompetence that only a place like Harvard can provide is frightening.

If ignorance is bliss, both Harvard and Jiffy-Lube have produced some extraordinarily merry dipshits.

Tim Requarth is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at trequarth

@hotmail.com.