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We Are All Confident Idiots

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Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#31

Post by tomp »

byEngineer wrote: post #20
lucio wrote: post #12

"epic housing bubble stoked by the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers" Isn't he being prey of his own effect? So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)" If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?

The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for…

> People don't like to think.

Well, that's a mostly empty statement, as it's unfalsifiable - even people who think, and see this happening, what can they do? Is there any way to profit from the mispricing of assets, when everything is overvalued? Well, you could short stuff, but that's a huge risk (since the central banks have an incentive to keep the bubble from bursting, so they can ramp the asset prices even higher), and only available to those with existing capital, not the "people". Move to a non-USD based economy? All economies depend on the USD, and if USD crashes, the whole world goes down with it. What are the "people" supposed to do other than to weather the upcoming storm?

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#32

Post by gsz »

It sounds like it's best to be doubtful and unsure about my knowledge. So as long as I can make sure I'm unsure, I'm good. But can I be confident that I'm unsure?

It's turtles all the way down.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#33

Post by Swizec »

Dewie wrote: post #26
Swizec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect[1], the cognitive bias that unskilled individuals overestimate their ability and skilled individuals underestimate it. "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in two principal ways: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate thei…

I swear this is HN's favourite bias to bring up on any topic relating to intelligence and aptitude.

Personally it brings me comfort to remember that maybe just maybe I'm not as stupid and mediocre as I feel most of the time.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#34

Post by Ono-Sendai »

lucio wrote: post #18
spain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually thinking the same, shame there wasn't an answer in the article.

The "right" (too simplistic) answer in the article is "B". "One group knew the right Newtonian principle: that the ball would continue in the direction it was going the instant it left the tube—Path B. Freed of the tube’s constraint, it would just go straight."

This is why science works well - it can tell us what the actual answer is, not just the one that is 'obviously right'.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#36

Post by Dylan16807 »

>whether his appearance as a judge on America’s Got Talent would damage his legacy. “No,” said one woman to this last question. “It will make him even more popular.”

Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie.

(The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovable, as a plausible future event.)

Disclaimer: only talking about the quote in the article, if there was more context it shouldn't have been cut

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#37

Post by bostonpete »

byEngineer wrote: post #20
lucio wrote: post #12

"epic housing bubble stoked by the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers" Isn't he being prey of his own effect? So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)" If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?

The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for…

Do they have "Doomsday Preppers" on the other side of the pond?

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#38

Post by [deleted] »

prof_hobart wrote: post #6

> some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts Is it possible that this is at least partly down to the phrase "some knowledge"? Knowing what parallax or lipids are might be seen as having some knowledge of the concept.

[deleted]

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#39

Post by adwf »

I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persists as a meme.

The problem is that "death of the weakest" is a much better way of describing it - although possibly not so PC to teach in the classroom. The reason why people think Cheetahs evolved to be fast is because they equate it with the ethic of hard work, rather than the real reason - slow cheetahs don't eat and therefore die before breeding, fast cheetahs eat and get to breed.

Without meaning to start yet another internet debate/flamewar about evolution, I often wonder whether the strong protestant work ethic in the US is also the reason why evolution is so poorly understood there. Because "death to the weakest" involves no agency, no self-improvement or hard work.

EDIT: Just to avoid to confusion (as there seems to be some!), I'm not talking about the mechanism of evolution, purely the actual phrase "survival" and what it means to people when it's mentioned, the implication of agency that goes along with the word.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#40

Post by xhedley »

emotionalcode wrote: post #28
Dewie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear this is HN's favourite bias to bring up on any topic relating to intelligence and aptitude.

I think the Dunning Kruger effect has been a meme/cultural/conceptual construct long enough (like the measurement of intelligence) that we need to test for a Reverse Dunning Kruger effect, where knowledge of the Dunning Kruger Effect correlates with bias in self evaluation.

Knowing about the Dunning Kruger effect makes me more inclined to ask other people how good I am at something instead of relying on my own opinion. Which I think would make my evaluation more accurate.
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