Re: RAT re: National Socialist Grammar

[jonoh1@juno.com]

Rock fucking on.
Jonathan



On Tue, 18 Jan 2000 15:36:58 -0500 MMA <Diogenes_@compuserve.com> writes:
>The New York Times
>January 18, 2000
>
>
>Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
>-----
>By ERICA GOODE
>
>There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning 
>is
>haunted by the fear he might be one of them. 
>
>Dr. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this
>because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not 
>know
>that they are incompetent. 
>
>On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in
>studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually
>supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, 
>than
>people who do things well. 
>
>"I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was 
>bad at
>and I didn't know it," Dr. Dunning said. 
>
>One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully 
>self-assured,
>the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence 
>often
>are the same skills necessary to recognize competence. 
>
>The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper
>appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and 
>Social
>Psychology. 
>
>"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate 
>choices,
>but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote 
>Dr.
>Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and 
>Dr.
>Dunning. 
>
>This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, 
>helps
>explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes 
>that
>are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- 
>and
>repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue 
>holding
>forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy. 
>
>Some college students, Dr. Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: 
>after
>doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why 
>the
>answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong. 
>
>In a series of studies, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning tested their theory 
>of
>incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest 
>quartile on
>tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to
>"grossly overestimate" how well they had performed. 
>
>In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively
>linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants 
>showed
>much greater distortions in their self-estimates. Asked to evaluate 
>their
>performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects 
>who
>scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 
>62nd
>percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be 
>at
>the 68th percentile. 
>
>Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar 
>test
>ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to "identify
>grammatically correct standard English," and estimated their test 
>scores to
>be at the 61st percentile. 
>
>On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes 
>according
>to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an
>"expert" panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were 
>also
>more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because 
>humor
>is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were 
>less
>conclusive. 
>
>Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the 
>study,
>Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their 
>own
>competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the
>absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent
>subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a
>phenomenon psychologists term the "false consensus effect." 
>
>When high scoring subjects were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of 
>their
>peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own
>performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored 
>badly
>themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some
>subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities. 
>
>
>"Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in 
>others,"
>the researchers concluded. 
>
>In a final experiment, Dr. Dunning and Dr. Kruger set out to discover 
>if
>training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of 
>incapable
>subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did
>improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their 
>performance
>realistically, they found. 
>
>The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's 
>assertion
>that "he who knows best knows how little he knows." 
>
>And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that
>overconfidence is a common; studies have found, for example, that the 
>vast
>majority of people rate themselves as "above average" on a wide array 
>of
>abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be impossible in
>statistical terms. And this overestimation, studies indicate, is more
>likely for tasks that are difficult than for those that are easy. 
>
>Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a 
>psychology
>professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, 
>said
>he suspected that most lay people had only a vague idea of the meaning 
>of
>"average" in statistical terms. 
>
>"I'm not sure the average person thinks of 'average' or 'percentile' 
>in
>quite that literal a sense," Dr. Funder said, "so 'above average' 
>might
>mean to them 'pretty good,' or 'O.K.,' or 'doing all right.' And if, 
>in
>fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then 
>it's
>really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong using the
>statistical criterion." 
>
>But Dr. Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated 
>that
>there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their
>competency, and not be aware of it. 
>
>In some cases, Dr. Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own 
>inability
>is inevitable: "In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the 
>woods,
>you know you're incompetent," he said. 
>
>But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more 
>ambiguous;
>even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite
>laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most 
>people
>from blurting out "You stink!" -- truthful though this assessment may 
>be. 
>
>All of which inspired in Dr. Dunning and his co-author, in presenting 
>their
>research to the public, a certain degree of nervousness. 
>
>"This article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors or poor
>communication," they cautioned in their journal report. "Let us assure 
>our
>readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin 
>we
>have committed knowingly." 
>

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