The other day I read an essay on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is without question one of the most important drivers of history. It is probably accurate to say that more things happen because of what we think we know than what we actually know, but who knows? The upshot of Dunning-Kruger is that man -- both individually and collectively -- is shadowed and haunted by "false knowledge" -- i.e., the whole category of things we know that just aren't so.
Let me highlight some passages from the essay that stuck out for me:
In one study, roughly 90 percent [of respondents] claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts we asked them about. In fact, the more well versed respondents considered themselves in a general topic, the more familiarity they claimed with the meaningless terms associated with the survey.
In short, confidence and cluelessness are directly proportional, at least in many people much of the time. And it seems that the unearned confidence prevents people from seeing how clueless they are. One thinks of Michael Scott in The Office, "the world's best boss." Or, in a more comedic vein, one thinks of the breezy confidence and utter vacuity of an Obama, "the world's greatest president," or of most any mainstream journalist or pundit.
Speaking of which, has any man in history exposed more political and journalistic Dunning-Krugery than Trump?
For more than 20 years, I have researched people's understanding of their own expertise -- formally known as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning -- and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull.
As a fellow once said, "being educated means 'being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.'" But "this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don't know are all too often completely invisible. We fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance" (emphasis mine).
Bottom line: "in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize -- scratch that, cannot recognize -- just how incompetent they are..."
But why? Well, for starters, recognizing "their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack." Boom: the ignorant are too ignorant to appreciate how ignorant they are. Thus, "the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge" (emphasis mine). Ignorance can feel just like knowledge. Or maybe you were never a liberal.
I'm thinking back on when I was young enough to know everything. Naturally I was a liberal, because -- as formalized by Hayek -- liberalism (or leftism, to be precise) is founded upon a pretense of knowledge that is strictly impossible for anyone to possess. At its extreme it leads to a kind of omniscience that serves as the pretext of the totalitarian state.
Example, plucked from this morning's headlines: former California governor Jerry Brown "told Congress on Tuesday that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party were responsible for the ongoing California fires because of their opposition to drastic climate change policies."
"California’s burning while the deniers make a joke out of the standards that protect us all,” Brown told the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday... “The blood is on your soul here and I hope you wake up. Because this is not politics, this is life, this is morality... This is real."
While it's nice to see a leftist acknowledge the reality of the soul, California is not burning because of Trump, much less because of the failure to enact any conceivable climate change policy. That's just clueless omniscience made even worse because it is enlisting the conscience to make its case. From this it is but a step to righteous violence -- to violence sanctioned by the conscience because the people who disagree with Brown are willfully and ineradicably evil. No wonder the left sympathizes with al-Baghdadi: professional courtesy.
Now, is there a solution to this perennial problem of ignorance-as-knowldege? We haven't yet finished laying our foundation, but I don't want to end on a pessimistic note, so I'm going to jump ahead with a passage by Schuon that goes directly to the question:
whoever wishes to use his intelligence without risk of going astray must possess the virtue of humility; he must be aware of his limitations, must know that intelligence does not come from himself, must be sufficiently prudent to make no judgments in the absence of adequate information.
Pride goeth before a fall into Dunning-Kruger.
23 comments:
Dunning Kruger, cognitive bias, cognitive closure, tribalism, virtue signaling, Satanism, personal irresponsibility, the MSM, deep state conspiracies, vast right wing conspiracies... Golly. So many things we can paste on people who think and believe differently from us.
But I have a real life example which I’m currently observing. I shouldn’t be concerned. I wish I could be like the other personally responsible sociopaths and just mind my own f-ing business, price gouge wherever I can, and just forget about it. But I’m seeing so much of it these days, when I rarely ever did it in my own preachers kid youth.
I’m currently doing business with a conservative Christian family whose youngest son seems at risk. The parents will soon be moving 3000 miles away for the only work the father could get in his career field. They recently converted their $750K home (they’re not rich, it’s just a very hot real estate city) into a duplex. The plan was for their youngest son, 17 YO, to stay behind to live in his birth home upstairs so he could complete his high school, and hopefully college. His elder sisters will help out but both are financially struggling and spend all their time on their many jobs.
The son has obviously fallen into a depression. He cuts school, gets stoned in his car, then takes extended naps in it. To me, he doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He seems to have no hope for his future. His mother is threatening to banish him from the house and rent out the upstairs.
My area has an ongoing meth crime crisis. It’s a very tech city, and most jobs are being filled with experienced or foreign talent. There is also a homelessness crisis. I’d consider employing him, but I’m no psychologist and struggle myself from bouts of financial uncertainty in these “economic boom times”.
Thus, "the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge"
As one kid says to another kid, "I'm probably tougher than your dad because I know karate!" (at a beginner level, of course)
Whoever wishes to use his intelligence without risk of going astray must possess the virtue of humility; he must be aware of his limitations, must know that intelligence does not come from himself, must be sufficiently prudent to make no judgments in the absence of adequate information.
This is almost verbatim, the scientists credo. Since bad theories get booed off the stage during peer reviews, scientists are usually kept pretty humble with any proclamations of intelligence.
Is there peer-reviewable proof that “the left sympathizes with al-Baghdadi”?
Given the attitude of your average relatively famous scientist, I'd say peer-review is more likely to produce pride than humility. It merely preserves social power relations in the form of affirming them as scientific truth. Emperor of China's nose problem all over again!
I read this post, then went on to read American Digest's post for All Hallow's Eve and clicked his link in the post about "the perception of the vertical in the universe" and, voilà, I'm back at this post again.
I finally figured out how to ignore the thing in the comments. Duh. Talk about Dunning-Kruger. Was the "collapse comments" always there? (I'm guessing it was.)
Forgot to mention, I especially like these:
"Speaking of which, has any man in history exposed more political and journalistic Dunning-Krugery than Trump?"
"While it's nice to see a leftist acknowledge the reality of the soul, California is not burning because of Trump, much less because of the failure to enact any conceivable climate change policy."
Cali's burning because it's run by literal (not figurative) gangsters for some 70 years, if Ron Unz is to be believed. Guess the 'stationary bandits' theory of government doesn't actually accord with the difference between criminals and functioning governments.
It's maddening driving around out here, seeing the most simple and obvious problems going unaddressed. Power lines everywhere overgrown by trees - not talking about the forests, just residential areas. There's a big dead tree a couple blocks from where I live, wrapped around the lines. Not anybody's problem, I guess.
When we lived in Florida, it was funny sometimes to see how the trees along the road were all trimmed into a Y shape along the lines, but it was done meticulously every year, because they know that every year there are weather problems and they want to minimize the hazards. California, apparently, can't be bothered. So many opportunities for graft, there's no time for real work.
Cali is burning because PG&E does not do basic maintenance, in a very dry state with much mature unnatural (non-native) vegetation. The many lawsuits they've acquired for negligence are seen by their board as the cost of doing business. In a functional capitalism utilities would not be monopolies and top executives would not be protected by government cronies from both parties. As if we didn't already learn that when Obama let the bankers go.
But lets all here just keep blaming "the other side". Know well that "the other side" is blaming you too in equal measure. Round and round we go, with never a resolution and a few corrupt cronies at the top, both private and "public servant", winning every round.
Speaking of spiritual Dunning-Kruger, Scientists discover mankind’s belief in evil 'caused by disease'.
To be fair, the Daily Star is like Britain's National Enquirer or possibly Weekly World News, so take it with a shaker of salt...
No, I mean that California is run by honest-to-goodness gangsters, an offshoot of the Chicago ones. These guys sure are bipartisan, after all, they ran in both parties in California - that's how they took over! If you wonder why some peoples' crimes never get punished, especially companies, just trace who-knows-who and you'll find no shortage of sweethearts.
Wonder how long it will be before they cash out of California completely? The sooner the better, I think.
For those wondering about the Unz article, this was it
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-power-of-organized-crime/
A telling excerpt:
Indeed, when Korshak was in his eighties, he was once suddenly approached by a Hollywood reporter on the street, and reacted as if he assumed that his number had finally come up, then was greatly relieved to discover that the fellow was just a journalist rather than the hitman whose coming he had long awaited.
These days though, the journalists are worse than hitmen!
Other news brought to you by Dunning-Kruger, in Washington it will soon (May 2020) be legal to use biosludged human remains to fertilize crops. What could go wrong?
Found here, where the following were presented as arguments for the bill:
“I am very much in favor of the composting of human bodies!” declared Wes McMahan, a retired cardiovascular intensive-care nurse who recently testified in support of the bill.
“When I’m done with this body that served me very well for the past 64 years, do I want to poison it with formaldehyde and other embalming chemicals? No,” he added. “Burned? Not my first choice. But what about all the bacteria I’ve worked with so long in this body – do I want to give them a chance to do what they do naturally? I believe in doing things as naturally as possible.”
Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of a company known as Recompose that aspires to be the first “natural organic reduction” funeral home in the United States, is also excited about the bill, which she says fulfills “a longtime hope” of hers to create “an urban, soil-based, ecologically friendly death-care option.”
So to save Mother Earth and her bacteriological offspring, we must sludge the bodies and use them for food production.
Sounds legit.
E-coli outbreaks on lettuce? Hold my beer
I remember the first time I encountered a group of sophisticated, educated lefties who told me that I needed to check my projection of evil, because there was no such thing as evil.
Human composting: ew, ew, ew. This is what happens when you discard belief in the resurrection of the body.
Not to mention the one-step-removed from cannibalism component. And wasn't there some scientist recently claiming we should all turn to cannibalism to save the environment? Seems like there's something darker motivating this kind of thinking...
Hello Panel.
Regarding embalming: what a waste. Who will you be trying to impress with your pristine corpse inside your casket six feet down? And try to rest eternally with acrid formaldehyde fumes wafting out of your orifices. In 10 years your corpse would look hideous.
Composting bodies is a waste of time as well. What for? The expense and effort of sludging 150-200 lbs of tissue is ridiculous. And the smell would be gargantuan and forbidding.
Now, a body could be taken to a beautiful secluded glen and left on the ground next to a memorial marker, and then the full natural recycling team of wasps, ants, flies, birds, and bacteria allowed to do their good work of returning you gently to earth. There would be only a mild putrid stench carried away on a breeze. A memorial tree could be planted as well. And some of your faithful gut bacteria, who served you long and well, could probably migrate into the topsoil and avoid anhilation. They deserve at least that chance.
I pretend to know what I'm talking about. I don't. Krueger....what was it? In spades. And I'm blonde.
-Sticky Buns
Whether it’s the extremely weird, disgusting, and unpopular idea of using soylent green to fertilize crops, or the completely unanticipated onslaught of a Dunning-Kruger engineered carbon eating bacteria exploding into the ecosystem killing everything in its path, we’re probably gonna need a certain amount of social responsibility to make up for the personal irresponsibility of Dunning-Kruger.
The hard part is (besides knowing what "experts' to trust) is knowing where to draw the line between personal responsibility and social responsibility.
Saving the environment through cannibalism? Didn't Swift already hit this one hard on the nose? In any case, there is SOME evidence that in terms of important nutrients such as fats and protein, a field of cattle is more efficient than a field of pretty much any crop we can grow that way - and this counts both milk and meat. There is a good reason to assume that pastoralism - the keeping of various cattle - by the ancient Indo-Europeans coming out of the steppes gave them decisive advantages in producing nutrients required for various strenuous tasks like thinking and fighting over mere agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers.
Vegans are already cannibals in many cases, being willing to eat human byproducts and even human bodies before that of animals. A shame that veganism tends to be a feedback loop: that particular diet makes you crazy, and being crazy justifies the diet.
As for getting rid of human bodies in a proper way, the tradition is ancient: Bury them in a graveyard in a pine casket, and then exhume them after some years. The casket will have rotted away and bones will be left (unless the person was incorrupt--!) the bones can then be taken and placed in an ossuary with the rest of the family. The space is then freed for another casket, and so on; I suppose you could ONE DAY run out of caves in which to place bones, but I suspect the amount of space in the earth's crust for little boxes of bones far exceeds the surface capacity of humans across all history.
Indeed.... Trump is a "break in the space-time fabric". 2019 is the year of polarisation, when the left drops the mask and shows its true fascist/ totalitarian /crazy colors for all to see. Worldwide, there is a rise in anti-left narratives - Bolsanaro, Trump, Hungary, Poland, even slowly in Australia. This will "red-pill" a lot of young people, and cause the beginning of the end of the Left. (and not a minute too soon...).
Astrologically, Pluto is in capricorn :
Pluto entered Capricorn on November 26, 2008 where it will stay until 2023. This long, extended stay of Pluto in Capricorn (2008 - 2023) will completely revise the power issues and issues of authority.
Pluto was last in Capricorn from November 1762 until December 1, 1778. (around the declaration of Independence for the USA).
so it's about breaking away from opressive powers.. The MSM propagandists, bad Science, big govmt, SJWs, Hollywood, etc.
And its worldwide.
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