Category: Life

We Can Be Stupid And Still Know It

We Can Be Stupid And Know It

Published: May 8, 2023 8.19am EDT

Debunking the Dunning-Kruger effect – the least skilled people know how much they don’t know, but everyone thinks they are better than average

John Cleese, the British comedian, once summed up the idea of the Dunning–Kruger effect as, “If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.” A quick search of the news brings up dozens of headlines connecting the Dunning–Kruger effect to everything from work to empathy and even to why Donald Trump was elected president.

As a math professor who teaches students to use data to make informed decisions, I am familiar with common mistakes people make when dealing with numbers. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that the least skilled people overestimate their abilities more than anyone else. This sounds convincing on the surface and makes for excellent comedy. But in a recent paper, my colleagues and I suggest that the mathematical approach used to show this effect may be incorrect.

What Dunning and Kruger showed

In the 1990s, David Dunning and Justin Kruger were professors of psychology at Cornell University and wanted to test whether incompetent people were unaware of their incompetence.

To test this, they gave 45 undergraduate students a 20-question logic test and then asked them to rate their own performance in two different ways.

First, Dunning and Kruger asked the students to estimate how many questions they got correct – a fairly straightforward assessment. Then, Dunning and Kruger asked the students to estimate how they did compared with the other students who took the test. This type of self-assessment requires students to make guesses about how others performed and is subject to a common cognitive mistake – most people consider themselves better than average.more

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The Age that You Peak at Everything

Age That You PeakMany of the points mark the middle of an age range that scientists have identified, which means they are all determined by averages. Some are also surveys, not controlled trials, so there is a possibility the self-reports don’t capture the most accurate picture.But in many cases, the numbers keep cropping up for a reason, which is that life isn’t a downhill slide from youth.Here’s what you have to look forward to.

Source: The peak age for beauty, wealth, and more – Business Insider

How to Spot a Narcissist

Psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School, Craig Malkin, who literally wrote the book on it, Rethinking Narcissism. “Narcissists are arrogant and argumentative, even the shy, quiet types (covert). They’re far more like to interrupt, glaze over when you speak, swear, post provocative pictures, and tag themselves in social media than ever use the word ‘I. “In fact,” adds Malkin, “it’s far more likely that narcissists would use the word ‘you’ because they blame people for everything and rarely take responsibility for their actions. It always about what  did. ‘I-talk’ isn’t going to help much because not all narcissists like talking about themselves anyway. The authors are right. We’re used to the expression ‘it’s always me me me’ and immediately associate it with narcissism… Nothing could be further from the truth.”

2012-06-09-a-NarcissistThe truer mark of a narcissist is absolute clarity about a situation, and an undying commitment to his or her opinion. “Look for an unwavering certainty (‘No—that’s just wrong. Here’s the truth’), name-dropping, attention grabbing gestures, breathless monologues, constant interruptions, and above all, a disagreeable, arrogant style.”

And consider this: Another recent study found that spotting a narcissist can be as easy as using the wonderfully simple “Single Item Narcissism Scale,” which asks just one question: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: ‘I am a narcissist.’” Participants rate their agreement on a scale from one to seven. In other words, if you want to know whether someone’s a narcissist, you really just have to ask them.

via Can You Spot A Narcissist? It’s Not As Easy As You Think, Study Finds – Forbes.

US Segregation Maps

Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: “The End of the Segregated Century.” U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910. But less segregated does not necessarily mean integrated–something this incredible map makes clear in vivid color.

The map, created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, is stunningly comprehensive. Drawing on data from the 2010 U.S. Census, it shows one dot per person, color-coded by race. That’s 308,745,538 dots in all–around 7 GB of visual data. It isn’t the first map to show the country’s ethnic distribution, nor is it the first to show every single citizen, but it is the first to do both, making it the most comprehensive map of race in America ever created. Thanks to Caroline for sharing this.

US Segregation Maps

Some Christmas Cheer for all you Preppers

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/11276913/So-this-is-how-the-world-ends…-isnt-it.html
Aside from the rise of the machines, many potential threats have been identified to our species, our civilisation or even our planet itself. To keep you awake at night, here are seven of the most plausible.

Documentary Storm – Watch Free Documentaries Online

 DocumentaryStorm

We believe that documentaries are meant to be shared and debated. The formula for a great documentary is: half Hollywood blockbuster and half Ivy League Education.  A documentary is the love child of both.

We are dedicated to finding you free, full-length documentaries lovingly chosen from around the web. The main goal of this website is to share knowledge, spread ideas, and have fun. We invite you to stroll through DocumentaryStorm: click around. Get lost. Pause. Learn. Speak. Listen.

Knowledge is power.

DocumentaryStorm adds a new documentary EACH and EVERY DAY!

Documentary Storm – Watch Free Documentaries Online.

What facts about the United States do foreigners not believe until they come to America?

This American Life, talking to refugees who’d moved to the U.S., mostly from conflict zones, found that the foreigners were shocked by a number of things that Americans might consider routine: public displays of affection, high obesity rates, families shipping their elderly parents off to nursing homes, dog-owners kissing their pets,Christmas lights and widespread gun ownership.

The U.S. can be such a jarringly strange place for many foreign visitors that travel guidebooks detail everything from the dangers of talking politics to tips on respecting Americans’ famously guarded personal space. But what do those visitors find when they actually get here? This American Life spoke to a relatively narrow slice of foreign arrivals, but a thread on public question site Quora, jumping off from the radio segment, asks web users from around the globe to chime in with what surprised them about America. Click on the link.

How Americans Are Different: What facts about the United States do foreigners not believe until they come to America? – Quora.

See How Fast “The West Was Won”

By 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act* of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s.

By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its original size.

Click the map to see it happen.

via Somersaultr – This is a series of maps charting the shrinkage of….

The 11 Ways That Consumers Are Hopeless at Math

You walk into a Starbucks and see two deals for a cup of coffee. The first deal offers 33% extra coffee. The second takes 33% off the regular price. What’s the better deal?

“They’re about equal!” you’d say, if you’re like the students who participated in a new study published in the Journal of Marketing. And you’d be wrong. The deals appear to be equivalent, but in fact, a 33% discount is the same as a 50 percent increase in quantity. Math time: Let’s say the standard coffee is $1 for 3 quarts ($0.33 per quart). The first deal gets you 4 quarts for $1 ($0.25 per quart) and the second gets you 3 quarts for 66 cents ($.22 per quart).

The upshot: Getting something extra “for free” feels better than getting the same for less. The applications of this simple fact are huge. Selling cereal? Don’t talk up the discount. Talk how much bigger the box is! Selling a car? Skip the MPG conversion. Talk about all the extra miles

via Business – Derek Thompson – The 11 Ways That Consumers Are Hopeless at Math – The Atlantic.

The Disadvantage of Smarts

Why would being a good problem solver mean you were less good at the ordinary more instinctive behavior?

General intelligence evolved to solve evolutionarily novel problems, so intelligent people are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel preferences and values. They are more likely to recognize and develop tastes for things that our ancestors did not have 100,000 years ago. For example, more intelligent people are more likely to be left-wing liberals because our ancestors were “conservative” by the contemporary American definition—they only cared about the well-being of their friends and family. They are more likely to be atheist because the preferred theory in evolutionary psychology is that humans are designed to believe in God.

Really?

Humans appear to be designed to be paranoid; they are designed to see intentional agents behind natural phenomena. This is because making the mistake of thinking that a natural event has an intentional agent behind it is less potentially costly than being oblivious and thinking that an intentional event, like someone trying to kill you, has a coincidental cause. The paranoid outlive the oblivious. Belief in God may be a consequence of this tendency. Intelligent people are more likely to be nocturnal because humans are designed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down. They are more likely to be homosexual, because humans are evolutionarily designed to reproduce heterosexually. They are more likely to enjoy instrumental music because music in its evolutionary origin was vocal, and they are more likely to consume alcohol, cigarettes and drugs because all of these substances are evolutionarily novel.

via Quick study: Satoshi Kanazawa on intelligence: The disadvantage of smarts | The Economist.

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