Dunning Kruger: The Biter Bit

The Dunning Kruger Effect seems so pleasing a finding that it surely must be true...

If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

...the Hard of Understanding are incompetent to understand that they are incompetent, while the intelligent and learned tend to underestimate their own competence, assuming that many people must be able to understand what they understand.

Most of one's life experience in a nutshell, plus American politics, nearly 97% of Twitter, slebs, "artistic" avant-gardists, &c, explained.

Alas

Two unique papers in Numeracy reveal problems with the graphic introduced in the 1999 Kruger and Dunning paper. Subsequent researchers used it, (y − x) versus (x) scatter plots, and related variants for nearly two decades. The authors show how a major part of the body of literature that used these approaches seems to have mistaken and interpreted mathematical artifacts as the products of human behavior.

 Whether this disproves the DK Effect (a false theory built on the mathematical incompetence of the researchers) or proves it (the researchers being incompetent to understand their errors and ploughing on regardless) I am not sure.

Please Don't Learn to Code

Coders: Please don't learn to code. Really, we've got it covered.

Management: We need people with brains like Alphabetti Spaghetti who can bluster copiously at all levels of the organisation.

Coders: Very well, here is your mainframe...


The Darwin-Coxe Machine or  Narrenturm, on which the insane were swung to calm them (Vienna early C20th).

FGM: Fakely Generated Mendacity

Very rum. Seems the totally evil Sir Christopher Chope

has totally blocked this righteous Law to make Female Genital Mutilation a crime in our Sceptered Isle...

...or, if not an "FGM Law" per se, as the Guardian insists, at least an amendment to Section 5A of, and Schedule 2 to, the existing 2003 Act.

There was I thinking that: FGM has in fact been illegal in Britain for 23 years or so; the law has only resulted in one prosecution and one conviction in all that time; Sir Christopher's objection was that an amendment relating to the custody of children should be properly scrutinised and debated in Parliament; far from blocking the amendment, the consequence of his action is that now Parliament has the opportunity to debate this very thing.



Imagine a world in which Parliament had some responsibility for making law, and making effective law at that; a world in which colourful ethnic pastimes like FGM were actually treated as crimes and prosecuted with vigour... a nightmare world against which the lying shitbags good folk at the BBC, the Guardian, are our bulwark.

MPs are spending a lot of time at the moment on important matters like "What I Did In My Holidays", bringing pine cones in for the Nature Table and sneering at Sir Christopher to advertise their own righteousness. Little chance, it seems, of any debate on FGM getting squeezed into the schedule anywhere.