Damien Miller's weblog

Here are two great social psych articles from a couple of New York publications: Learning to Lie (Po Bronson, New York Magazine), and Taking Play Seriously (Robin Marantz Henig, New York Times). These confirm my status as Neurotic Parent :)

posted at: 23:00 | path: /readings | permanent link

This might be slightly old news but this paper is essential reading: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6., pp. 1121-1134

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities

It is pretty depressing too, once the reader starts to consider the fields of endeavour they are blissfully incompetent in.

posted at: 14:39 | path: /readings | permanent link

Umberto Eco's essay on proto-fascism should be read by every thinking person, and re-read until the horror of how much of it we already tolerate sinks in.

posted at: 22:14 | path: /readings | permanent link

I just finished reading Scott Aaronson's NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality (also known as quant-ph/0502072). With excellent humor, Aaronson dicusses various comptational models ranging from the merely strange (Soap bubbles and quantum computers) to the completely wacky (Anthropic computing, where you kill yourself if you don't get the right answer). He makes a case that the hardness of NP problems should be considered as a physical principle, with interesting predicive consequences.

posted at: 16:28 | path: /readings | permanent link