Unlikely to go anywhere

11:00AM

Nov 16 2010

Wolfgang Nedobity (Vienna): Casanova and the Italian Taste. The world is lousy with aspiring novelists who will probably never be published; Alix Christie offers insight into what keeps them working. From The Chronicle, apes and monkeys, dogs and cats are being unnecessarily confined, vivisected, and killed while animal advocates are ignored as a lunatic fringe; the cruelty of much animal experimentation cannot be justified on scientific grounds, because it has proved largely unproductive; and letter-writing campaigns may ease consciences, but they won't cure diseases. David Weigel on Pete Peterson's unserious campaign to get America to think seriously about the national debt. Annie Lowrey on why the deficit commission's proposal is unlikely to go anywhere. Moral judgments in social dilemmas: How bad is free riding? Die, Phone Book, Die: After a decade of obsolescence, the local phone directory is finally getting the chop as states wise up to reality. Hope, change, reality: Attorney General Eric Holder entered the Justice Department on a mission to reinvent it — unfortunately, Washington doesn't like an idealist. Year-end best-of lists can make for predictable reading — does anyone not know that Jonathan Franzen wrote the big novel of 2010? Instead, Bookforum asked the authors of our favorites to tell us what they liked reading this year. In the grip of the new monopolists: Do away with Google, break up Facebook? We can't imagine life without them — and that's the problem. Fool's Gold: Why the idea of a gold standard is best relegated to the dustbin of history (and more). Are we hardwired to love taxes? Jonah Lehrer on feeling rich, poor or overtaxed. Why conspiracy theorists think The Simpsons may have predicted 9/11. Police State 2010: A series on American MP's in Kandahar. Bringing the coffin industry back from the dead: How barcodes and touch screens are resuscitating a casket factory.

via bookforum.com

another interesting, semi-themed collection of annotated links from Omnivore, the Book Forum blog, xblogged to flâneuse, arts and places ("nowhere" is a place, isn't it? An "unplace" at the very least.

Posted via email from Meanderings

midday musings to the contrary

"Musings" makes a workable series for blogging disorganized thoughts and those other otherwise not subject to easy categorization. How to blog blogs (redundant, meta or what?) recommend series as way to organize blog posts and even keep them on some sort of regular feeding schedule. Including the series name in the title signals to readers in advance whether or not to bother with the post. The lazy sots like that. Stuck in a feedback loop: maybe meta is a synonym of sorts for redundant. Wouldn't that twist a knot in the skirts of culture theory wonks?

Don't grumble. I warned you "musings," by definition, would be disorganized. This one's for me so I get to do what I want the way I want. No public service announcements, no concern with community spirit, no advocacy unless ironically intended, no calendar announcements, no free PR for virtual parasites and other ingrates: in short, no business whether as usual or otherwise. Musing + graphic (appropriate or even just selected at random) seems like an easy recipe for keeping up.

Homework: drafting a firm but tactful policy guide for service and expository (information) blogs. Tricky combination. Musing, in this case, vents less tactful tendencies currently in ascendancy. Having a paid gig doing pretty much what I've been doing for free casts free online services and the bad behavior of the recipients in a whole 'nother light. I was already out of sorts with the whole syndrome and its tribe of accomplices. Had been long enough for it to be an old song. That not only strips me of bitching rights but makes me an enabler. Whoa. Come to a screeching halt. Make a sliding stop right there

Now time will be tighter. Much. Necessity that mother requires I tend to matters by weeding out virtual parasites and other time thieves. Thank you Mother Necessity for saving me from myself.

1. accept only easy to turn around submissions, preferably ready to blog but let's be realistic
2. DOWNSIZE it dammit (images, files): 1MB limit is beyond generous.
3. no more doc conversions or accepting files  I can't open
4. no more unlimited reminders, 1 reminder after original query, 3rd time just shoot them like in the old joke about the stubborn mule and training Kate
5. speaking of time and time thieves, make those submissions in a timely manner

Consume!

'nuff said, via David Ruccio's occasional links & commentary

The Dunning-Kruger effect

The masses are a$$es ... and so are their handlers. We already knew this. But did you know there is a theory for it it? Dear (and likely imaginary) Reader, I'll leave the specifics of  local and global applications up to you.  More colloquially known as "confident dumb people." Post cheerfully cribbed from Wikipedia

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed–albeit less scientifically–for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about. Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying. Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt. Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf or driving a car.

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

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Links

• post about DKE on "You Are Not So Smart," subtitled "a celebration of self-delusion" (how apropos) and self-described as " a blog devoted to self delusion and irrational thinking." Flâneuse is putting this one on the rss reader immediately
• The Anosognosic's Dilemma (Opinionator, NYT)
• Confident Dumb People (Boing Boing)
• DKE even has its own web site
• and b-net tells you what to do about it

It's everywhere: government, management, organizations, the education system. Spread the word, warn everybody.

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