Saturday, January 27, 2018

Is Trump a Lemon Juice Bank Robber?






Some criminals are just dumb or have really bad luck.  And if we are not personally effected by the crimes, the deeds sometimes appear hilarious. 

Dunning–Kruger effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Footnotes omitted.]


The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Conversely, highly competent individuals may erroneously presume that tasks easy for them to perform are also easy for other people to perform, or that other people will have a similar understanding of subjects that they themselves are well-versed in.

Original study

The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.". . . 

Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance. The pattern of overestimation of competence appeared in studies of reading comprehension, of the practice of medicine, of motor-vehicle operation, and of the playing of games such as chess and tennis. Dunning and Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.


Monday, January 22, 2018

Reward Work, Not Wealth



Reward Work, Not Wealth


Oxfam has put together a briefing paper on extreme wealth inequality.  I recommend that you read it—pages 18-20 suggest solutions.


https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-reward-work-not-wealth-220118-summ-en.pdf

The Oxfam study was cited by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.   @esglaude
William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Princeton University

Monday, January 15, 2018

I'm with Durbin & Graham

It is very sad that today's political debate centers on whether the president said ---hole or ---house.  Both are vulgar, and so is he.  And so are his policies.  And yet it is reported that the president is happy to be dominating the news cycle this way.

But for US Senators and the head of Homeland Security, so-called "grown-ups," to deny what they heard or to suggest that maybe they did not hear "shithole" because they claim [or US taxpayer-paid spokespeople suggest or leak] they heard "shithouse" is just absurd.

Friday, January 5, 2018

Trump is Nuts. Action is Needed.




The scariest fact in the world today is the apparent unstable mental status of the president of the United States. 

The saddest fact is that the Republican majority in Congress is not acting in the interest and preservation of the country.

We have an absence of effective Republican-majority Congressional control over the president. The Republican-majority Congress is not only unwilling to take proactive measures to remove this president, it is supporting the Trump line of trying to discredit the special counsel’s investigation and the Republican-majority House and Senate committees’ investigations.

Based on media reports, there may be sufficient evidence now for a successful impeachment if the Republican majority would act in the interest and preservation of the world.

That the president has a big button makes the fear of a catastrophic event all too realistic.

A Vox article, “The psychiatrist who briefed Congress on Trump’s mental state: this is ‘an emergency’” clearly describes the immediate dangers.  https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/5/16770060/trump-mental-health-psychiatrist-25th-amendment

Dr. Lee distinguishes her proposed intervention from a psychiatric assessment of the individual:

“We are assessing dangerousness, not making a diagnosis. The two are quite separate: Assessing dangerousness is making a judgment about the situation, not the person. We are assessing dangerousness, not making a diagnosis. The two are quite separate: Assessing dangerousness is making a judgment about the situation, not the person.”

Republicans you must act quickly.  Tax cuts will prove to have limited utility in the face of a nuclear or “conventional” war.