We Are All Confident Idiots

[BREMPRO]

From Pacific Standard Magazine
David Dunning professor of psychology at Cornell University.

"...In our work, we ask survey respondents if they are familiar with certain technical concepts from physics, biology, politics, and geography. A fair number claim familiarity with genuine terms like centripetal force and photon. But interestingly, they also claim 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 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 it in the survey.

"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 perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge."

"But here is the real challenge: How can we learn to recognize our own ignorance and misbeliefs? To begin with, imagine that you are part of a small group that needs to make a decision about some matter of importance. Behavioral scientists often recommend that small groups appoint someone to serve as a devil’s advocate—a person whose job is to question and criticize the group’s logic. While this approach can prolong group discussions, irritate the group, and be uncomfortable, the decisions that groups ultimately reach are usually more accurate and more solidly grounded than they otherwise would be."

"For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions."

Long but worth the read! Some useful insights into personal, societal and political ignorance included
MORE :http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/confident-idiots-92793/

[SheilaT]

1. Great article.

Thanks for posting it.

[BREMPRO]

2. YW, thought it was insightful about american character in particular..

[SheilaT]

3. Yes. I must say, that one of the things my mind strayed to

while reading it was how so many people these days self-publish, because they are convinced they are such fabulous writers, and the stupid agents and editors just can't recognize that, and so they think they can bypass the gate keepers, put their deathless prose out there, and become rich and famous.

This is a major peeve of mine, and I'm right now in a writing critique group that contains someone who has only self-published, who sees no need to go the conventional route, and hasn't a clue how terrible his prose actually is.

[dogknob]

4. "For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate..."

You certainly have a valid point. However...

For every Fifty Shades Of Grey, there are countless good writers who will never get published because they write about subjects the MSM would rather not hear about.

I doubt Harrison Bergeron could get published today. How's that for "hip, edgy and ironic?"

[SheilaT]

6. I have no intention of reading

Fifty Shades, since I don't generally read pornography. Harrison Bergeron I've read, and yes, it would be published today. Science fiction really does edgy stuff like that all the time.

More to the point, for every Wool There are about ten thousand writers who have become convinced that once they self-publisher their brilliant (hah!) novel, the world will quickly discover how wonderful their writing is and they'll get rich. The reality is (and keep in mind I haven't yet read Wool although I do have a copy and hope to get around to it, I am yet to read a self-published book that was worth reading.

I was at a fairly serious science-fiction novel writing workshop recently. One of the participants gave us the first couple of chapters of her second novel -- the first being in the hands of an indie publisher already -- and we were all horrified, to put it kindly. For one thing, not having read the first one we couldn't quite figure out what was going on. For another, the badly constructed sentences and the plot flaws completely stood in the way of being able to enjoy it. This person desperately needed a lot more input than she realized when she sent off the first one to be published. I understand she is back re-writing the first based on what we told her.

And all this goes back to the point of the article, of overconfidence on the part of people least able to understand their ignorance of something. The wanna-be writers who never read is perhaps the example I'm most familiar with.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

5. Bookmarked for later reading.