The cat was chirping.
She was telling the zoosemiotician something, but it was heavily contextual, so he had to stop what he was doing, whatever that was, something with a pen and a Moleskine that looked like a guy fisting a wasp while Juliette Binoche watched, and observe the cat more closely.
The cat was chirping and looking at the front door, so the zoosemiotician opened the door and the cat went out. Three more came in, so he fed them.
It was like a story problem. One cat goes out, three come in, how many are eating? Two, because one has a thing whereby he won’t eat with the other cats unless you watch.
Obviously not hungry enough, was the zoosemiotician’s diagnosis. He was depressed. He had been reading about how stupid people are. That is, he had known it for a long time, that people are stupid, but god. He had made the mistake of reading about Fox news pie charts that were nonsense and Fox news survey results that added up to 120%, and he had watched that video where that guy interviews Palin supporters and not a single one can name a single actual Palin policy. Even accounting for bias and editing, it was a chilling thing to watch.
The zoosemiotician thinks, the Dunning-Kruger effect goes further towards explaining modern society than any other single explanation of anything.
The zoosemiotician’s wife comes into the kitchen. He offers her coffee.
“WTF is that in your journal? It looks like a guy fisting a wasp.”
The zoosemiotician chirps. His wife opens the front door.
A cat comes in.
The good news is that people have always been dumb. Or maybe that’s bad news, if you know anything about history.
I was talking to Gamma about that on the way to school this morning. And the Dunning-Kruger effect.
“Some effect. I forget the name,” I said. “I’ll google it and tell you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Basically, the dumber people are, the smarter they think they are.”
“Okay.”
“In answer to your question about how someone like Palin could become a leading political candidate.”
“Okay.”
Then we fought cannibals in our shoes made from plastic bags and felt scraps.
Dunning-Kruger effect. Aha! So there’s a name for this phenomenon which I have been noticing more and more since I moved to California. “4.If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.” This is under “Hypotheses” in the Wikipedia article. But here in SoCal people who exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect most often have no interest in improving their skill level. My own opinion: When you hire a person for a job in California, whatever that person knows the first day of work is (likely) all they’re ever going to know about the job. They don’t want to learn anything nor see any need to. If they don’t know the answers they make things up. Dealing with these people, whose jobs range from physicians and dentists to people who sell you cell phones, is something of a nightmare. Of course there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions. But none of this is surprising when you consider that at some point in the US they stopped teaching subjects in many schools and started “teaching” self esteem. What can you expect from people, who all their lives have gotten one message: “You are special, you are wonderful, and you are doing a great job!”? So now we have a country full of very dumb people who think very highly of themselves! This the outcome that should have been expected.
Sometimes it does seem like you have to know how to do everything in the world yourself, if only so you can tell if the people you hire to do those things are doing them right and not releasing toxic gases into your house, giving you a driver’s license with a secret code that gets you free cavity searches when your taillight burns out, building bridges to nowhere, etc. I try to look at these situations as Emersonian exercises in self-reliance. Doing so rescues at least a few coins from the swear jar.
Besides, with everyone’s poor head full of amalgam fillings, how can anyone do their jobs properly? It’s not NASA’s fault they can’t stop the meteors.
But when you get sick because they did allow toxic fumes into your house, when your doctor’s office has confused your medical information with another patient’s (computer software glitch?) and then insists it’s correct, (no paper backup), and that you really do have atrial fibrillation and have been taking Coumadin for the past twenty years, and what the hell is wrong with you that you can’t remember this, and when they double dose your daughter 4 times with a very toxic chemotherapy drug because the nurses don’t read the label where it says, “This is not a single dose vial”, well, it’s hard to keep a philosophical attitude, is what I mean. (All of these things have happened to me.)
Another thing: I printed out the Wikipedia article on the Dunning-Kruger effect and showed it to my son-in law when he stopped by to pick up my grandson. He said, “You mean there’s a name for this? I thought it was just the way everybody is.” He also said, and I thought this was interesting coming from a (relatively) young man, that he thinks that so many men coming into adulthood now have a huge sense of entitlement, because they were raised to believe that they are special, that they are wonderful, and that they excel in everything they do.
That’s not the Dunning-Kruger effect. That’s a gypsy curse.
It’s not clear to me to what you are referring, gordon. What, exactly, is it that you think is a “gypsy curse?”