"It ain’t what you don’t know ..."

[Yardley]

"...that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." -Josh Billings.

I was thinking the other day about confirmation bias after an excellent NY Times article, "A Quick Puzzle to Test
Your Problem Solving" in the Good Reads thread recommended by Colonel Hogan. If you have not taken that test it is well worth doing. I don't want to issue any more of a spoiler on that but it could easily be its own thread.

This morning, I was looking for the name of the Dunning-Kruger effect and found a recent article by Dr. David Dunning that elaborates on the whole field of meta-cognition and his famous work that showed that people tend to overestimate their competence and knowledge.

So the two ideas converged into thinking about how we think and how we form, hold, and defend opinions and how we see things factually.

"We Are All Confidant Idiots" is worth the long read. It explains pretty much all of the dynamics you see on the board where one person is sure that the other is an idiot.

This is the gist of Dunning-Kruger:

In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The really money quote for me was:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq).

He goes on in the article to tie in other theories of meta-cognition together in a way that explains why it is that exposure to more knowledge polarizes people along existing lines based on their ideological biases

The anthropological theory of cultural cognition suggests that people everywhere tend to sort ideologically into cultural worldviews diverging along a couple of axes: They are either individualist (favoring autonomy, freedom, and self-reliance) or communitarian (giving more weight to benefits and costs borne by the entire community); and they are either hierarchist (favoring the distribution of social duties and resources along a fixed ranking of status) or egalitarian (dismissing the very idea of ranking people according to status).

I saw parallels to every ongoing argument that I see both here and the so-called real world. I am confidant that there will be plenty of examples forthcoming that will mirror his observations.

 

[hssh345Alt]

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He goes on in the article to tie in other theories of meta-cognition together in a way that explains why it is that exposure to more knowledge polarizes people along existing lines based on their ideological biases

Quote:
The anthropological theory of cultural cognition suggests that people everywhere tend to sort ideologically into cultural worldviews diverging along a couple of axes: They are either individualist (favoring autonomy, freedom, and self-reliance) or communitarian (giving more weight to benefits and costs borne by the entire community); and they are either hierarchist (favoring the distribution of social duties and resources along a fixed ranking of status) or egalitarian (dismissing the very idea of ranking people according to status).
.

I liked this one. Would be interesting if someone extended it towards a discussion about men vs women's mentalities Or conservatives vs. liberals.