Final Report Released by Panama Maritime Authority of the grounding of the Ever Given
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfchAELXsVI
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
Question WHY Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing: An Animated Lesson from David Dunning (of the Famous “Dunning-Kruger Effect”) in Business, Psychology
https://www.openculture.com/2017/12/why ... azing.html
The business world has long had special jargon for the Kafkaesque incompetence bedeviling the ranks of upper management. There is “the Peter principle,” first described in a satirical book of the same name in 1968. More recently, we have the positive notion of “failing upward.” The concept has inspired a mantra, “fail harder, fail faster,” as well as popular books like The Gift of Failure. Famed research professor, author, and TED talker Brené Brown has called TED “the failure conference,” and indeed, a “FailCon” does exist, “in over a dozen cities on 6 continents around the globe.”
The candor about this most unavoidable of human phenomena may prove a boon to public health, lowering levels of hypertension by a significant margin. But is there a danger in praising failure too fervently? (Samuel Beckett’s quote on the matter, beloved by many a 21st century thought leader, proves decidedly more ambiguous in context.) Might it present an even greater opportunity for people to “rise to their level of incompetence”? Given the prevalence of the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” a cognitive bias explained by John Cleese in a previous post, we may not be well-placed to know whether our efforts constitute success or failure, or whether we actually have the skills we think we do.
First described by social psychologists David Dunning (University of Michigan) and Justin Kruger (N.Y.U.) in 1999, the effect “suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately.” So says the narrator of the TED-Ed lesson above, scripted by Dunning and offering a sober reminder of the human propensity for self-delusion. “We frequently overestimate our own abilities,” resulting in widespread “illusory superiority” that makes “incompetent people think they’re amazing.” The effect greatly intensifies at the lower end of the scale; it is often “those with the least ability who are most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent.” Or as Cleese plainly puts it, some people “are so stupid, they have no idea how stupid they are.”
Combine this with the converse effect—the tendency of skilled individuals to underrate themselves—and we have the preconditions for an epidemic of mismatched skill sets and positions. But while imposter syndrome can produce tragic personal results and deprive the world of talent, the Dunning-Kruger effect’s worst casualties affect us all adversely. People “measurably poor at logical reasoning, grammar, financial knowledge, math, emotional intelligence, running medical lab tests, and chess all tend to rate their expertise almost as favorably as actual experts do.” When such people get promoted up the chain, they can unwittingly do a great deal of harm.
While arrogant self-importance plays its role in fostering delusions of expertise, Dunning and Kruger found that most of us are subject to the effect in some area of our lives simply because we lack the skills to understand how bad we are at certain things. We don’t know the rules well enough to successfully, creatively break them. Until we have some basic understanding of what constitutes competence in a particular endeavor, we cannot even understand that we’ve failed.
Real experts, on the other hand, tend to assume their skills are ordinary and unremarkable. “The result is that people, whether they’re inept or highly skilled, are often caught in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception.” How can we get out? The answers won’t surprise you. Listen to constructive feedback and never stop learning, behavior that can require a good deal of vulnerability and humility.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW EVEN MORE (in a very entertaining package by John Cleese)?
https://www.openculture.com/2014/12/joh ... study.html
say that, if you want to vastly overestimate your own capabilities, you need only do one of two things: (a) get coked out of your mind, or (b) get behind the wheel of a car. But what if the problem runs deeper in humanity than that? Indeed, what if our inability to perceive our own incompetence exactly matches the degree of the incompetence itself? Now, none of us can do everything well, but we’ve all met people who, even well outside of the contexts of drugs or driving, simply cannot grasp the full extent of how much they can’t do well. “The problem with people like this is that they are so stupid,” explains Monty Python’s John Cleese in the clip above, “they have no idea how stupid they are.”
“In order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place,” Cleese elaborates, “which means — and this is terribly funny — that if you are absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills you need to know that you are absolutely no good at it.” With that, he gives us an extremely brief introduction to the Dunning–Kruger effect, “a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate” owing to “a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude” (and, by the same token, of “highly skilled individuals to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others”).
The effect takes its name from Cornell University researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning, the latter of whom Cleese, who has spent time at Cornell as a long-term visiting professor (where he has, among other projects, taken part in a talk about creativity, group dynamics and celebrity), counts as a friend. He originally invoked Dunning and Kruger’s “wonderful bit of research” in the video “John Cleese Considers Your Futile Comments,” where he talks back to YouTube commenters on Monty Python videos — in this case, those who mentioned the names of certain political commentators beneath the 1970 sketch “Upperclass Twit of the Year.” “This explains not just Hollywood,” Cleese concludes, “but almost the entirety of Fox News.”
Those of you interested in both cognitive phenomena and conservative American political figures will surely have seen Gates of Heaven and A Brief History of Time documentarian Errol Morris’ most recent film The Unknown Known, a long-form conversation with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the years before its release, Morris wrote a five-part series for the New York Times called “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma,” fueled not just by his fascination with Rumsfeld but with his near-obsession over the Dunning-Kruger effect. In it, he actually interviews Dunning himself, who summarizes the issue thus: “We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.”
Dunning even brings up the subject of Rumsfeld first, specifically about his speech on “unknown unknowns” that gave Morris’ movie its title. It goes something like this: ‘There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.’ He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, ‘That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.'” When Morris followed up, Dunning added that “the notion of unknown unknowns really does resonate with me, and perhaps the idea would resonate with other people if they knew that it originally came from the world of design and engineering rather than Rumsfeld.” Or maybe they could associate it with the Ministry of Silly Walks instead.
When movies mirror life much too accurately
The poster child for Utter Incompetence
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