Categories



Duly Quoted

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
-- Oscar Wilde


Tom Christensen
("xensen") . tom [at] rightreading.com
 

Search This Blog

Subscribe

rss feed button

12 Recent Posts

Most posts appear early weekday mornings.

Top 12 Currently Popular Pages

1 How to Get a Book Published
2 Chinese Jade
3 The Yi jing
4 Taoism and the Arts of China
5 Books for Writers
6 Glossary of Book Publishing Terms
7 Famous Last Words
8 On Julio Cortazar
9 Gutenberg and Asia
10 On Lewis Caroll's Sylvie and Bruno
11 Daybook: November
12 The Making of Masters of Bamboo

Are you incompetent?

I don’t know what I was doing in January 2000 when this article came out, but somehow it didn’t make an impression at the time. Now I saw it cited again, and I have to say it explains a lot.

David A. Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell, and Justin Kruger, a graduate student, did a study that found that incompetent people are more confident of their capabilities than competent people are.

From the article: “One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.”

Comments

Comment from Carla Cathers
Time: October 7, 2006, 9:32 pm

I guess that explains Vincent Libretti.

Write a comment