Category: Dunning-Kruger
Undergraduate Career Advice!
Yeah, but seriously if you are planning your post-school studies, seek proper professional advice and not this blog post.
Via numerous Twittery things, the question of what degree a young person intent on Higher Education should study has been doing the rounds in various ways. One source was a snarky comment about English degrees from a successful writer, a second one I ended up Tweeting about was somebody claiming that STEM students can cope with Arts/Humanities degrees better than vice-versa. I’ll get to the specific question of writing & the humanities v STEM in a bit but I want to look at things more generally first.
More after the fold – as this goes on for awhile.
Reason Hell: The Dunning Kruger effect
A short Reason Hell this week. The Dunning-Kruger effect has had a lot of publicity bu one of the things I really like about it is that one of the papers by Justin Kruger and David Dunning is just so readable. It also has one of the best anecdotes ever used in a serious and influential paper:
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o-clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheller was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras
Originally sourced from: Fuocco 1996 M A 1996 March 21 Pittsburg Post-Gazette Trial and error: They had larceny in their hearts but little in their heads
There is a copy of the whole paper here http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf
