Improbable Research

It’s shameful when valuable data goes unused, especially when that data was produced at great public expense.

In October of the year 2000, we presented an Ig Nobel Prize to the authors of a study called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“. Almost exactly a month later, in November 2000, the United States began an experiment ? a very expensive experiment ? that has been running now for seven years.

I’ll tell you briefly about the study, and then I’ll tell you about the ongoing experiment.

The study was done by two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, at Cornell University [Kruger has since moved to New York University]. They begin their report by telling this story:

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.

Dunning and Kruger then recount how they tested people on various skills ? mostly logic and grammar. They discovered that people who are incompetent simply don’t recognize that they are incompetent.

Dunning and Kruger did their experiment on college students.

The seven-year experiment I mentioned is on a whole different level.
It’s producing data about high-level government officials.

Throughout the upper strata of the U.S. government, thousands of competent executives and managers have been systematically replaced with incompetent people ? people who have little or no experience, skill or ability at their jobs. (It has been documented in numerous places. If you’re curious, one good place to look is the web site
talkingpointsmemo.com)

These managers and executives are hard at work, every day, diligently applying their incompetence. It would be a scientific privilege to interview them ? to observe them closely under what’s known as “naturalistic conditions”. Direct observation is more accurate than second hand accounts.

Psychologists and anthropologists have only a few months left to gather this mother lode of data. Come January 2009, many of these appointees will exit left, pursued metaphorically by bears.

If these observations go unmade, future social scientists will curse their 2008 predecessors for laying abed while so much incompetence was lying in the fields, waiting for harvest.

The data is there, right now, ripening and rotting. Let’s collect it, and study it, and see what we can learn from it. And let’s put it on display. Otherwise, our descendants will dismiss it as just myth and legend.

[NOTE: This first appeared as part of the Nature podcast on March 20, 2008.]

David Weinberger reviews a popular Copanhagic play about physicists:

We saw Michael Frayn?s Tony-award-winning play, ?Copenhagen,? last night. Disappointing.

It?s about the mysterious meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in Newark, NJ. (Nope. In Copenhagen. Just kidding. Haha.) The play goes over various ?drafts? of the meeting, trying out possible explanations of why Heisenberg, a loyal German (or is he??), would seek out his former mentor, a half-Jewish Dane living in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Heisenberg was the head of the German effort to create an atomic bomb (or was he??), and Bohr snuck out of Denmark and joined the Manhattan project (or did he?? ? well, yes, he did). … But it?s over-written and, worse, depends upon a stupid pun: Y?see, Heisenberg is famous for his Uncertainty Principle, and all of human understanding is also uncertain, so since both use the word ?uncertainty,? they?ve got to be the same thing, right? So, let?s make a play about it.

Yech.

Say, I have an idea! Let?s write a play called ?Croton? about Pythagoras. It will draw a dramatic parallel (so to speak) between Pythagoras? theorom about right angles and his own uprightness. ?It is all a matter of finding and living the right angle,? he will say. ?After all, aren?t we all a hypoteneuse??

Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that’s not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It’s a simple fact.

Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His 2003 study, The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

E. Edward Bozoyan received US patent #2929336, issued in March 1960, for a “valve structure.”

Alas for Mr. Bozoyan, search engines now identify him as “Bozo Van”.

As for Bozo (not Mr. Bozoyan), his history appears to be a muddle. To dip into the saga, begin with a report called “The Unusual History of Bozo the Clown - unraveling who did what when in the creation of Bozo.” Here is its beginning:

Most clowns are created and performed by one individual. There are exceptions, of course, such as the Harlequin, a character from the Comedia del Arte. A more contemporary exception is Bozo the Clown, who is owned, copywritten, and trademarked property of Larry Harmon. But although Mr. Harmon has done an admirable job of marketing Bozo the Clown worldwide, the story of Bozo does not begin with him. Instead, it begins at Capitol Records, in 1946….

U.S. patent #6782847 granted August 31, 2004 to David Shemesh and Dan Forman, both based in Israel, for an ?automated surveillance monitor of non-humans in real time.? The patent contains a sequence of three drawings?reproduced here?that, by themselves, pretty much explain the inventors? thinking.

In this technical drawing, two of the sensor-bearing dogs are alarmed by a passing terrorist. Both dogs say ?WOOF WOOF WOOF.? Shemesh and Forman write that ?FIG. 1B illustrates a situation wherein the amplitude and perhaps also the frequency of the barking of a dog indicates an alarm situation.?

(That?s an excerpt from the article ?Plucked from Obscurity: Technology + Animals,? published in AIR 14:1.)