Dear readers, sorry I haven't post for a while. My excuse is that I have been spending my spare time reading a research thesis paper I have downloaded off the web... I know, I know, I am such a cool dude and I am the life of the party wherever I go.
(To be perfectly honest with you, I simply ran out of things to yammer on about :-)
You see, from my surfing a few weeks back, I stumbled across this psychology study entitled:
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Authored by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell U, it is a fairly old paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology during 1999.
The research's preposition is that if a person is hopelessly incompetent in a domain of his life, there is simply no way for that person to recognise his own putrid incompetence in that domain. The authors concluded that:
- The incompetent will tend to overestimate their ability in the given domain.
- Given a finished result, the incompetent will be unable to judge what is good work and what is complete rubbish.
- The incompetent will not be able see that he is an idiot, despite all social evidence to the contrary.
Scary... In fact, I could be that idiot, believing that I am the next Shakespeare, running around naked, writing this completely aimless and inane blog, which is basically the sum of all the pus that is my existence. AND I wouldn't have a clue about how crappy this blog is.
hmmm...
I suppose this study also means that:
- Given an idiot, when he meets another idiot, they would not be able to tell if each other are completely idiots. They could possibly mistaken each other as geniuses.
- When this idiot meets a genius, without any skills or base of reference, will believe that the genius is complete nutter.
So what does this mean? I want you, my dear genius readers, to appraise my blog and how stupid it is, or indeed how stupid I am for spewning such a steaming pile of turd. Spare me no blushes...
3 comments:
I agree on the author, but not what you derived from it. As an idiot is unable to know what is good work or bad work, it implies when N idiots meet each others, there would be 1/(2^(n^2-n)) chance that they all mutually agreed that they are all genius. Even the chance of a group of 10 idiots think that they are all genius is just 8x10^-28.
I'm feeling stupid reading the post.
ln - clapping furiously....
gnaphos said: "there would be 1/(2^(n^2-n)) chance that they all mutually agreed that they are all genius"
Agreed, so for 2 idiots the probability is 25%, which is still a significant percentage...
ln - clapping furiously....
gord - joins in with the clapping
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