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We Are All Confident Idiots

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Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#111

Post by atmosx »

xhedley wrote: post #40
emotionalcode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think Michael Jordan needs to ask anyone in order to test his basketball skills? I'm fairly sure he doesn't do that and no matter people (some people) will tell him about this or that players being better, he firmly believe that he could win them in court, in his prime. IMHO Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't work if you reverse the claim.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#112

Post by j4meserljoness »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #105
sakri wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this with developers: The young gun who assumes he understands architectural concepts without reading up on them, and re-invents the wheel (often producing a wheel that's tough to turn). Then there's the cocky senior who doesn't need the latest and greatest because he already "knows" they do the same thing as his solution from 15 years ago (and when he's fired he can't find work because he's a dinosaur). I know…

Do dinosaur managers just talk slower?

No, they also eat leaves that are further up the tree due to their long necks.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#113

Post by philh »

robert_tweed wrote: post #7
atmosx wrote: post #3

"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare Act 5, Scene 1: [...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...] I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.

That certainly borrows from Socrates: " I know one thing: that I know nothing. "

That was incredibly underconfident of Socrates.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#114

Post by hindsightbias »

tsunamifury wrote: post #109
byEngineer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds a lot like Chinese astroturfing. As you read his comments further down it becomes more apparent.

Going to be lonely over there, all the rich Chinese are buying property in the US.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#115

Post by DigitalJack »

tokenadult wrote: post #73

This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand…

I'm a perfect example. My wife was telling me that her sister's workplace required women to wear skirts. I told her that was absurd and could not possibly be legal. I was wrong. I believe in nutshell that all that is required is a consistently applied dress code (pun intended I guess) and not violating religious beliefs.

I was stunned.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#116

Post by jeangenie »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #64
gjm11 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that recurs throughout history. We've got Socrates and Shakespeare already mentioned in the thread, to which I'll add: W B Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Charles Darwin: "Ignorance more frequently be…

Erich Fried wrote a poem called "Angst und Zweifel", it goes roughly like this: do not doubt the one who says he is afraid but be afraid of the one who says he knows no doubt

Is this your own translation?

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#117

Post by anigbrowl »

Bargs wrote: post #90
mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place. From the article: "The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often p…

Not to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks.

This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/

* with apologies to Pendleton Ward.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#118

Post by colomon »

d23 wrote: post #82
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.

Honestly, even knowing they were made up my brain's first instinct was "yeah, those sound familiar." If they were just asking about "some knowledge" I can see how people might say, "hmm, yeah, that sounds like something I've heard before."

And even more so with people's names, at least for me. For every name I know solidly there are probably two that I vaguely sort of know.

For instance, I probably know more about Irish traditional music than 99.9% of the American population. But if you came up with a real-sounding random name for an Irish musician and talked about him like he was real and of course I should know who he was, the odds that I would confuse that with someone I knew a bit about are substantial.

Or (speaking of Irish music) remembering tunes. There are tunes I own, tunes I think I know, tunes that are familiar, and tunes I flat out don't know. In my experience, I have the most trouble playing are some of the tunes I think I know -- more even than playing the tunes that I would just describe as familiar! Most of those I thought I knew I could probably sort out later given time, but in the heat of the moment what comes out can be nonsense.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, when I get in trouble is on the fuzzy boundary between knowing and not knowing. I don't mind saying "I don't know" when I know I don't know. But sometimes I don't know I don't know, and that's when the trouble starts.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#119

Post by leeber »

I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.

Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about.

For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these types around. When a conversation comes up and the knowledge of the people involved is put to the test. Maybe your boss is asking who knows how to perform a certain task, or who has experience with certain hardware or software, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking what is the best TV they should buy, etc. There's the people who claim to know about topics XYZ when they really don't, and you, naturally, admit that you don't know. But you might still be the most knowledgeable person about the general topic, and best candidate to offer advice or take on said task. Doesn't matter, you get labeled as the uninformed person while the "idiot" who claims to know everything about XYZ appears to be knowledgable expert. And worst case scenario is when your boss, co-workers, friends, etc. are dumb enough not to catch it.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#120

Post by anigbrowl »

mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

Eponysterical :-)

I'm very fond of a book called The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, which proffers a difficult-to-falsify but still compelling conjecture of why this should be. As you'd expect from such an ambitious title it requires an awful lot of handwaving, and accordingly it is viewed as heretodoxy in academic circles.

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