You Are Not So Smart
Jun. 6th, 2010 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleVery interesting blog concerning misconceptions about cognition. Nothing terribly new to me, but the writing style is great, and there's lots of links to illustrative studies. Some sharp quotables, too. To wit:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Misconception: The more talented you are, the more confident you become.
The Truth: The more experience you gain, the more modest and humble you become, but the less skill you have in a certain field, the more you will overestimate your expertise....
...Have you ever wondered why people with advanced degrees in climate science or biology don’t get online and debate global warming or evolution, yet mouth breathing dipshits will write 30 paragraphs about the real age of the Earth?
The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.
The sentence in bold is something I've been noticing quite a lot lately, and it's what is behind a lot of bad decision-making by amateurs. The reason it is so easy for the media to sway public opinion is because many complicated subjects become represented in their entirety by very small facets of that subject; its totality is never exposed.
(What happened to the rest of that Gaza aid flotilla, anyway? Doesn't a flotilla normally contain more than one boat?)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Misconception: The more talented you are, the more confident you become.
The Truth: The more experience you gain, the more modest and humble you become, but the less skill you have in a certain field, the more you will overestimate your expertise....
...Have you ever wondered why people with advanced degrees in climate science or biology don’t get online and debate global warming or evolution, yet mouth breathing dipshits will write 30 paragraphs about the real age of the Earth?
The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.
The sentence in bold is something I've been noticing quite a lot lately, and it's what is behind a lot of bad decision-making by amateurs. The reason it is so easy for the media to sway public opinion is because many complicated subjects become represented in their entirety by very small facets of that subject; its totality is never exposed.
(What happened to the rest of that Gaza aid flotilla, anyway? Doesn't a flotilla normally contain more than one boat?)
