Category: Academia

Donald Trump: a great example of how ignorance can warp your perspective of your competence compared to others. Photo courtesy of DonkeyHotey via Flickr. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The Dunning-Kruger effect has had a lot of press recently because of Donald Trump. Almost two decades ago, in their very readable paper, Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,  Cornell psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning showed that incompetent people lack the ability to gauge their own incompetence if they have even a tiny amount of knowledge in a particular area. (If I need to explain the connection to Trump at this point, we probably shouldn’t get into a political discussion…) For example, explain Dunning and Kruger, “most people have no trouble identifying their inability to translate Slovenian proverbs, reconstruct an 8-cylinder engine, or diagnose acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.” However, if they think they know anything at all about a domain, even the people with the least ability – after objective testing – think they are above average. Read More …

Christof Koch and I see eye to eye on a few things. For one, we’re both Mac-heads. (Although I have no Apple logos anywhere on mybody). For another, he used to be a neuromorphic engineer: building analog neurons out of silicon. A couple of nights ago I came across a podcast talk by Koch and found we had something else in common… neither of us see any evidence for the existence of free will. Read More …

My friend Patrick Purcell died just short of his 78th birthday last week. I’m still thinking about what I want to say about him personally, but his death has made me think about that of another friend of mine, about what they had in common, and about dealing with grief. Read More …

I’ve recently been working on a major article, for which I’ve interviewed something like 30 different people. Obviously you do some investigation before you set up a meeting, so you have a reasonable expectation that it’s going to be interesting. And indeed, most for this story were. All but one: with a philosopher. I actually walked out of the room early using the words, “I mustn’t take up any more of your time.” Read More …