“Our obsession with money and susceptibility to charisma, over-confidence and surface gloss have propelled us into an age where sham, spin, trickery and twaddle have become the new norms,” writes Shelley Gare, in the Sydney Morning Herald: How phonies and self-promoters came to rule the world … We can’t say we weren’t warned…. Almost 25 […]
Tag: incompetence
The Dunning-Kruger Song
By somewhat popular demand, here’s a video of “The Dunning-Kruger Song”: The song honors the research study “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34. […]
The Incompetence Opera (including the Dunning-Kruger song)
Here’s video of the premier performance of “The Incompetence Opera”: “The Incompetence Opera” is a musical encounter with the Peter Principle and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. And with the word “so.” This opera premiere was part of the 27th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, September 14, 2017, at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University. The opera is composed of three […]
Preview: “The Incompetence Opera”
The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will include the premiere of a new mini-opera: “The Incompetence Opera.” It’s a musical encounter with the Peter Principle and the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s about how and why incompetent people rise to the top — and what that implies for everybody. Music by Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, John Walter Bratton, and Anon. Story […]
The physics of The Peter Principle; the trumping power of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Italian physicist Andrea Rapisarda presents his Ig Nobel Prize-winning research about The Peter Principle, at the Ig Nobel show at the University of Oslo. The show was the first stop of the 2016 Ig Nobel EuroTour. Behold the video: The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for management was awarded to Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the […]
The Impossible Expertise of Self-Perceived Experts
David Dunning, who won an Ig Nobel Prize for his landmark study of incompetent people who believe themselves to be competent, has now done a study about people who believe themselves to be experts. The new study is: “When Knowledge Knows No Bounds — Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge,” Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig, […]
Cleese opines to great effect on Dunning and on Kruger
John Cleese, the tallest and angriest of the Monty Pythons, tells here, in this video, of his controlled, venomous glee at learning about the Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Open Culture blog comments about Cleese’s commenting. David Dunning and Justin Kruger — the Dunning and the Kruger of the Dunning-Kruger effect — were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for psychology, for […]
Ig Nobel winner David Dunning surveys recent research about incompetent people
Ig Nobel Prize-winning Cornell psychology professor David Dunning — he of the Dunning-Kruger effect — tells the majestic story of incompetent people, in this essay in Pacific Standard: We Are All Confident Idiots BY DAVID DUNNING • October 27, 2014 • 4:00 AM The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise. […]
On the presumed competence of British (and other) spies
Adam Curtis, writing for the BBC, assembled a narrowly focused history of British spying agencies. He focuses on the question of competence: The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they – and all the reactions to them – had one enormous assumption at their heart. That the spies know what they are […]
Interview with Ig-winner David Dunning
Filmmaker Errol Morris interviewed Ig Nobel Prize winner David Dunning. Part 1 appears in today’s New York Times, under the headline The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (part 1) Dunning and Justin Kruger shared the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology for their modest report, “Unskilled and Unaware of […]