…it’s that the whole foofaraw over whether gays should be allowed in the military is, let’s say, generally phrased in entirely in the wrong verb tense.
(Three of five locals currently online at a male-only personals site I just looked at are soldiers. And no, from personal experience, I don’t find this at all surprising.)
You’ve probably heard something about Kruger and Dunning’s “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” in the eight years since it was published.
In case the title doesn’t strike an immediate chord, this was the paper (largely) introducing and supporting research demonstrating that, across a variety of performance domains:
Boiling it down, many people who suck in a given field not only don’t realize they suck, they cannot be convinced that they suck.
Like I said, you’ve probably heard something, somewhere, about this paper since it was released in 1999. You may not have realized that there’s been a lot of follow-up research, testing the effect in a huge variety of fields of performance, consistently validating the original research and the occurrence of the same trends in numerous distinct and unrelated types of performance.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot ever since I first heard about it, years ago, and have been hitting it hard ever since I went to the ACRL convention in Baltimore. At the convention, I saw a paper presented confirming the presence of this familiar tendency regarding performance and self-evaluation on general information literacy tasks.
What really struck me at ACRL was when I saw, for the first time, a phenomenon play out in physical space that I’d previously only seen on places like Slashdot.
Whenever you see this research discussed on a large electronic forum, you will notice the immediate emergence of lots of self-congratulation and mockery of those stupid idiots who think they’re above average but in fact flat-out suck. I’d seen this in a scaled-down form when discussion of the research came up in small face-to-face groups, but it never really hit me until I was in a room of a couple hundred people being introduced to the phenomenon.
There was chuckling at the stupid idiots. There was a palpable smirkiness in the air. There was an unmistakable sensation of people shaking their heads in bemusements at those dumbfucks on the bottom of the performance scale.
And there was me, white knuckles clenching the chair arm, forcing my ass to remain in my seat and my tongue to stay clamped in my mouth.
“Hey!” I wanted to jump and shout. “Hey, all you chucklers! Wipe off those smirks! If you actually understood this research, which you clearly don’t, you would realize that you–yes, you–are a member of the population being described by the sample researched.
“And once you realized that, you would have a cold rush in your chest. You wouldn’t be able to smirk because you’d be too hard caught in contemplation.
“Because, dear arrogant ones, you would realize that your condescension is based entirely on your self-evaluation of being an above-average performer. And you would see, spelled out in heavy black chart lines, the fact that anyone self-evaluating as above average is almost as likely to actually suck as sie is to excel.”
I bet Bertrand Russell had, or would have had, a handy label for the set of people who cannot realize they are members of that set. I further bet that there are really interesting implications deriving from the existence of that set, but I have no idea what they might be.
And here is why:
“Multitasking� is definitely a very descriptive word for [Millennials], and library and teaching faculty here also describe them as a “wired-in group� that “want to be successful, and if not in the classroom, then socially.�
Yup. It’s only in the group of persons born after 1983 in which we find 18-year-old who want to be successful and popular. Never before in the history of humankind have we seen such a remarkable phenomenon, so we must all bow to this group’s (also unique) desire for instant gratification[1] and give them ponies.
[1] No, really, that’s what the library literature says. Honest.
According to its cover, my new notepad is “100% Recycled”. Now, I doubt that this is a boast that the pages are temporally unstable and have somehow been reconstituted into a new form even before I’ve had a chance to scribble on and discard them, so it looks like “recycled” now means not only “put to new use after being discarded” but also “constructed from materials that have been put to new use after they were discarded”.
This intrigues me, and vaguely disturbs me. The disturbance is not because of any semantic slippage, because the new usage makes perfect sense and probably isn’t as novel as it strikes me as being, but more because there seem to be some ontological/temporal implications that just don’t sit right.
An awfully large number of presumably information literate people cannot figure out how to properly unsubscribe from a standard Listserv-powered mailing list.
Le sigh.
My car has what seems to me an unusual feature, although given the low-end nature of the vehicle I imagine it must be common these days. In the trunk, there is a big yellow handle that one can pull to release the lock if one happens to get locked inside.
I know that getting stuffed unwillingly inside a trunk is a common occurrence in movies featuring gangsters and serial killers[1], but I have to wonder how often it happens in reality. Unusual things do happen, of course, and I guess it’s better to be able to escape from inside a car’s trunk than to be stuck inside with the tire iron, but I really do wonder about the manufacturers’ motivation.
It’s all very Bowling for Columbine, don’t you think?
[1] As working with Boolean operators has been a major part of my life for some time now, I’m not sure what conjunction would be best used there. Natural language’s use of AND and OR are horribly sloppy to begin with, and it seems to me that the common usage tends to reverse what AND and OR (should? do?) imply.
I’m sure most of you aren’t blog-obsessed to have the background necessary to adequately follow along with this story, which is written with a whole big bunch of unexplained references, but it does point toward a phenomenon I’m curious about.
This is a very human behavior, one that seems to exist irrespective of an individual’s religion, politics, education level, or any other readily identified variable.
That said, it doesn’t seem to be exactly universals. I think we’re all guilty of some minor form of it at some time or another, but what interests me are the really overblown cases, which do seem to be evinced fairly frequently by some individuals.
What I’m talking about are situations in which a person has been engaging in unambiguously provocative behavior that–surprise!–provokes a heated response. The individual then commences to whine loudly, at length, and for an extended period of time about that response.
Listening to the whine, it turns out that the real complaint isn’t about the intensity of the response, or about the argument put forth therein. Instead, the whine is entirely about the fact that the people being provoked dared respond at all. It’s even more interesting than that, though, because the whiner inevitably frames the complaint as a situation in which sie was completely innocent, minding hir own business before being attacked out of the blue. This framing is clearly unrelated to the actual facts of the situation, but the whiner refuses to acknowledge hir complicity as provocateur in any way.
So, really, what’s up with that? And is it, as I suspect, related to the frequent complaint from perpetual adolescents who conflate protest and censorship?
(You know that situation. Group A says something offensive, group B says “I’m pissed off that you said that,” and then the perpetual adolescent harangues group B for infringing on group A’s supposed First Amendment rights. Apparently, for the perpetual adolescent, free speech is available only to the party that speaks first.)
So a bunch of religious folk, including the Catholic League, were incensed by plans to display an anatomically correct statue of Jesus made of chocolate .
To be blunt: Isn’t an essential part of the whole Jesus megillah, especially for Catholics, the notion that he is edible?
Is that really the problem? Is the problem that the statue is naked, demonstrating that the Son of Man was, y’know, a son of man? What, in all seriousness, is the problem here?
Is marble inherently more reverent than chocolate? What about plaster? That certainly doesn’t seem right. That a mass-produced cheap plaster tchotchke produced in an anonymous sweatshop should raise not even an eyebrow while a painstakingly crafted work of art draws ire seems, well, just plain stupid. It can’t be the craftsmanship that’s upsetting people, then.
Likewise, it really can’t be the chocolate, can it? Jesus is edible, after all; in fact, he encourages us to chow down on his bits.
It must, as it so often does with zealots, come down to the genitals. Since Jesus couldn’t have been a enuch, after all, so we are left to understand that it must be the position of those offended that Jesus must have been genderless, free of chromosomes X and Y, smooth as a Ken doll. That doesn’t seem quite right, though, since many of these people (in my experience, at least) grow quite testy in defense of the notion that God and his avatar are male-gendered. Since masculinity is dependent on the presence of a penis and testicles, as these same people’s attitude toward the transgendered suggests, Jesus must have had bait and tackle.
Don’t tell me it has something to do with a “lack of reverence” or any such tosh. These are the same people who sell God’s Gym t-shirts and statues of Jesus playing football. They lost their claim to reverence a long, long time ago, and anyway I fail to see how chocolate is any less reverent than plaster or PVC.
So, really, what’s their problem? Here is a lovingly realized artwork that exemplifies two of the most important hallmarks of their conception of Jesus, his comestible nature and his possession of male genitals, and they get their knickers in a twist? One almost gets the impression that =religion for them is simply a tool for ordering the world into In-groups and Out-groups, with no inherent meaning or demands on its practitioners whatsoever. But that couldn’t possibly be right, now could it.