Better Today, and a name for an old concept.

[chris_gerrib]

Sorry for my cranky post yesterday. A good night's sleep helped put things in perspective.

In other news, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an organization I aspire to be a member of, is having their annual election. SFWA did a wonderful job of publicly shooting themselves in the foot last year. The chief architect of that shooting, Vice President Andrew Burt, is running for President. The inimitable John Scalzi has the scoop on why that's the dumbest idea this year. It's an amusing read.

Other then the fact that, six months after I stopped participating in Critters.org (ran by Andrew Burt), I'm still getting emails from them, I don't have a dog in this fight. But Scalzi's post gave me a name for something I've noticed for a long time.

From time to time, I've had to deal with obviously incompetent people. What struck me about many of them was that they didn't seem to realize that they were incompetent. As Donald Rumsfeld* put it, they had "unknown unknowns - things you don't know that you don't know."

Turns out that this problem as a name - the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Click the link - apparently somebody actually did some research on this. The things you learn on the Internet.



*Some of my readers may think that ole' Don suffered from the Dunning-Kruger effect. I leave that decision to you, gentle readers.

Comments

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

I once read a post by that Andrew Burt, where he expressed a sort of Luddite suspicion about the internet. It struck me as weird for the Vice President of an organization that represents science fiction authors.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Burt is also a computer science professor. His "Luddite" suspicions of the Internet (specifically electronic piracy) led directly to putting one round in SFWA's foot.