Too clueless to recognize they're clueless...

Nords

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"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"

"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. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras."

"Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the cognitive ability to realize it."

The article is packed with more priceless quotes that are sure to be nailed to many management doors this week...
 
Thanks for the link. It looks like an interesting magazine, so I bookmarked the home page.
 
No one wants to believe their abilities are less than average.


I like the part about humor. And the sample funny joke: If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'probably because of something you did
 
What boggles my mind is the sample pool: Cornell undergraduates. I mean, one would think you've excluded the riff-raff at that point. What would be the results if you included a sampling of high school dropouts?
 
This reminds me of first year law school. After my criminal law exam, I got a ride home with a classmate. We made the first year student mistake of discussing how we answered questions. He had a wildly different take on the questions than I did. He also went on and on about how he aced the test.

He flunked out.
 
About 25 years ago I was shopping for an up and running business. Most everything seemed too expensive, with overstated potential and not enough current cash flow.

I would ask the brokers, why would you expect someone to buy this? If I wanted to roll the dice, I would start greenfield, not with something which has already shown that it doesn’t work.

Mostly they deflected the question, but one guy told me that almost everybody thinks they have the mojo that it will take to make some decrepit business fly once more.

I kept remembering Warren Buffet- "We don't do well at kissing frogs."

Ha
 
Back in 1980 when I was a sophmore in college I took a statistics class and we had to do an end of the class project whereby we had a theory and had to prove ourselves right or wrong with statistics.

My theory was that those that scored 90 and above on exams would tend to underestimate their performance and those that scored 70 and below would tend to overestimate their performance directly after a test.

I worked with the prof to add a question to each test "how do you think you scored on this exam" and did it across several classes.

My theory was proven statistically correct. On of the most fun projects papers I ever did. Mostly I was happy because the data collection effort was so simple. Other class members wrote surveys and worked really hard.

Guess I shoulda been a pyschologist. But then I wouldn't be retiring early probably.
 
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