April 15, 2017

• Looking Confident

  I have been seeing the Dunning-Kruger Effect up close for many years. I may have been guilty of the inverse. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First the poem and then the explanation.

  She doesn’t have a clue
  But her confidence is soaring
  Not aware her fact’s untrue
  Unshaken wisdom pouring
  Ignorance she’s roaring

  This is an English Cinquain. I like the English, very sensible people. Their version is composed of 5 lines with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-b. There is no meter requirement.

  The Dunning-Krueger Effect is defined as a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize their [own] ineptitude. What that means for me is that the less someone knows the more confident they are believing that they have mastered the skill. The basic premise is that the stupid are too stupid to recognize that they are stupid. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

  There is a corollary: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. I have to fight against this all the time. And that's all I'm going to say.

  • 6:17 am
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