opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1
post&posall=TopAd,Bar1,Position1,Position1B,Top5,SponLink,MiddleRig ht,Box1,Box3,Bottom3,Right5A,Right6A,Right7A,Right8A,Middle1C,Bottom7,B ottom8,Bottom9,Header1,Header2,Header3,Inv1,Inv2,Inv3,CcolumnSS,Middle4 ,Left1B,Frame6A,Left2,Left3,Left4,Left5,Left6,Left7,Left8,Left9,JMNow1, JMNow2,JMNow3,JMNow4,JMNow5,JMNow6,Feature1,Spon3,ADX_CLIENTSIDE,SponLi nk2&pos=Header1&query=qstring&keywords=?
post&posall=TopAd,Bar1,Position1,Position1B,Top5,SponLink,MiddleRig ht,Box1,Box3,Bottom3,Right5A,Right6A,Right7A,Right8A,Middle1C,Bottom7,B ottom8,Bottom9,Header1,Header2,Header3,Inv1,Inv2,Inv3,CcolumnSS,Middle4 ,Left1B,Frame6A,Left2,Left3,Left4,Left5,Left6,Left7,Left8,Left9,JMNow1, JMNow2,JMNow3,JMNow4,JMNow5,JMNow6,Feature1,Spon3,ADX_CLIENTSIDE,SponLi nk2&pos=Header2&query=qstring&keywords=?
post&posall=TopAd,Bar1,Position1,Position1B,Top5,SponLink,MiddleRi ght,Box1,Box3,Bottom3,Right5A,Right6A,Right7A,Right8A,Middle1C,Bottom7, Bottom8,Bottom9,Header1,Header2,Header3,Inv1,Inv2,Inv3,CcolumnSS,Middle 4,Left1B,Frame6A,Left2,Left3,Left4,Left5,Left6,Left7,Left8,Left9,JMNow1 ,JMNow2,JMNow3,JMNow4,JMNow5,JMNow6,Feature1,Spon3,ADX_CLIENTSIDE,SponL ink2&pos=Header3&query=qstring&keywords=?
post&posall=TopAd,Bar1,Position1,Position1B,Top5,SponLink,MiddleRi ght,Box1,Box3,Bottom3,Right5A,Right6A,Right7A,Right8A,Middle1C,Bottom7, Bottom8,Bottom9,Header1,Header2,Header3,Inv1,Inv2,Inv3,CcolumnSS,Middle 4,Left1B,Frame6A,Left2,Left3,Left4,Left5,Left6,Left7,Left8,Left9,JMNow1 ,JMNow2,JMNow3,JMNow4,JMNow5,JMNow6,Feature1,Spon3,ADX_CLIENTSIDE,SponL ink2&pos=Middle1C&query=qstring&keywords=?
post&posall=TopAd,Bar1,Position1,Position1B,Top5,SponLink,MiddleRi ght,Box1,Box3,Bottom3,Right5A,Right6A,Right7A,Right8A,Middle1C,Bottom7, Bottom8,Bottom9,Header1,Header2,Header3,Inv1,Inv2,Inv3,CcolumnSS,Middle 4,Left1B,Frame6A,Left2,Left3,Left4,Left5,Left6,Left7,Left8,Left9,JMNow1 ,JMNow2,JMNow3,JMNow4,JMNow5,JMNow6,Feature1,Spon3,ADX_CLIENTSIDE,SponL ink2&pos=TopAd&query=qstring&keywords=?
com 1 The Juice David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A Fuoco: ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY, SUSPECT'S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn't the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc.
Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras. In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler's arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into "this thing" blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details -- "although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work." He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn't anywhere to be found in the image. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. or Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.
As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber -- that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity. Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one's self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective -- say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments," was published in 1999.
Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, "When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine." It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect -- our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. In search of more details, I called David Dunning at his offices at Cornell: DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn't possibly be true. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent. DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you'd say, "Wait a minute. But when 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. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. DAVID DUNNING: If you look at our 1999 article, we measured skills where we had the right answers. And our test-subjects were all college students doing college student-type things. Presumably, they also should know whether or not they're getting the right answers. And yet, we had these students who were doing badly in grammar, who didn't know they were doing badly in grammar. We believed that they should know they were doing badly, and when they didn't, that really surprised us. ERROL MORRIS: The students that were unaware they were doing badly -- in what sense? DAVID DUNNING: There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem -- namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don't know it. Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person? It's knowing that there are things you don't know that you don't know.
Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about "unknown unknowns." It goes something like this: "There are things we know we know about terrorism. And I thought, "That's the smartest and most modest thing I've heard in a year." Rumsfeld's famous "unknown unknowns" quote occurred in a Q&A session at the end of a NATO press conference.
All of us in this business read intelligence information. And we read it daily and we think about it, and it becomes in our minds essentially what exists. Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" seem even less auspicious.
Are they like a scotoma, a blind spot in our field of vision that we are unaware of? I kept wondering if Rumsfeld's real problem was with the unknown unknowns; or was it instead some variant of self-deception, thinking that you know something that you don't know.
And yet...
|
http://csua.com/feed/