Alexander Pope famously said: "To Err is human." He is probably also saying from his grave that "to err on social media with confidence is really, really embarrassing." Or maybe we are looking at it all wrong. Maybe this kind of blind confidence should be admired. Even studied. Because the comment sections of the internet are full of them, and it is an epidemic that doesn't seem to be ending soon.

What Pope did actually end up saying was that to "forgive is divine." We aren't sure what it makes us if we point, repost, and laugh. But it is surely very far from divine. But Bored Panda did the dirty work for you and compiled the most confident among the confident. The knights of not-knowing. The folks who saw an opportunity to argue and completely disregarded the consequences of their undeniable wrongness.

Before assuming that confidently wrong people are simply undereducated, check yourself. Lord Kelvin , aka William Thomson, was one of the most brilliant physicists of the 19th century and the man who essentially revolutionized thermodynamics. There is even a unit of measurement named after him, so it is safe to say the man had something going on upstairs.

That same man declared confidently that "radio has no future," insisted that "X-rays will prove to be a hoax," and stated with full conviction that "flying machines larger than air are impossible." All three of those things now exist, and we can't even imagine a reality without them. Genius comes with no immunity to being spectacularly, historically wrong, and the sooner we realise that, the better.

You might want to argue that Lord Kelvin was simply a product of his times, so what excuse did Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, have? He watched Apple announce the original iPhone in 2007 and laughed on camera. In a USA Today interview that has since been viewed millions of times, probably on the very device he was mocking.

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. He doubled down on Microsoft's existing mobile strategy, missed the smartphone revolution entirely, and the whole episode is widely credited as one of the most expensive wrong opinions in corporate history. The iPhone currently holds around 60% of the US smartphone market . No chance, indeed.

The reason people dig in rather than fold is not stupidity; it is neuroscience. Psychologist Mike Brooks Ph.D. explains that the brain processes being wrong as a direct threat to identity and survival, triggering the same defensive response as a physical threat.

"When our personal or social identity is at stake," he notes, "we are more likely to distort reality and deny that we are wrong to defend such identities." So the person in the comments getting increasingly unhinged might seem stubborn, but their brain has classified the correction as an onslaught and is just doing what nature intended it to.