The Dunning–Kruger effect

I recently had a long and “interesting” exchange with an individual on a Reddit.com story about the Yes / No on 1 vote in the American State of Maine.

You can read the entire debate here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0ty0/the_faces_of_the_yes_on_1_campaigners_in_maine_as/

..and my particular conversation thread here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a0ty0/the_faces_of_the_yes_on_1_campaigners_in_maine_as/c0fcl3z

Needless to say I wasn’t very happy about the result of the vote, whereas my main opponent took the opposite stance. But I was reminded in the course of our conversation about cognitive framing biases—as is so often the case in matters where one side blindly argues X is a valid reason for turning reason Y on its head—such as arguing night is day, black is white or that old favourite, which is in-fact a corruption of something Bertrand Russell once said about mathematical axioms, 1 + 1 doesn’t always equal 2. Because these kinds of mental gymnastics are the only way a deeply misinformed opinion might begin to make some kind of sense, in the mind of the person who holds onto it, they are very easy to spot in someone else, but very difficult to identify in oneself.

Then, thanks to the power of the internets, this little gem came to my attention and things started to become a little bit clearer…

From Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, 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.”

Rachel Maddow confronts Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips

Part 1

Owners of internet domain name Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 mount a legal response

The original comments thread to this story, when I first posted it, got so cluttered up with mouth breathers, I stopped paying attention. Now, a couple of weeks after it has calmed down, I’ve had a chance to read it more fully, with great joy in my godless heathen heart at the panicked fear in the knee-jerk childish tone of Beck’s believers.

Of course, Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 in the same way a lump hammer floats on water. There is absolutely no evidence or suspicion of his innocence whatsoever. Just as there is no evidence or suspicion surrounding the birthright of the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussain Obama, or indeed any reason to suspect he had anything other than an ordinary Christian upbringing.

The vast majority of the sister loving redneck book dodgers who have risen to Beck’s defence, however, don’t concern themselves with such trifling matters of indisputable fact.

“All liberals should die slow, horrible deaths while I piss in their dying faces, laughing so hard that a small turd pops out and lands on their exposed eyeball”

“THis [sic] is just another leftist way to discredit someone who is awakening America to the stupidity of the government. If you can’t join em, make something up. Get a life.”

“If anyone can find the humor [sic] in this, it will be Glenn, but I’m sure not laughing about it. I can’t believe how ignorant and insensitive our nation has become. Not to mention lazy, selfish, irresponsible. God help America to get back to the values it was founded upon.”

Read more…

Perhaps the “values” so many of Beck’s supporters are so keen to get back to are those that question the motives of anyone who isn’t white, middle-class and so steeped in the corporate news agenda they’re incapable of breaking Poe’s law?

Congressman Keith Ellison, who the non-raping, non-murdering Glenn Beck of Fox News interviewed last November—thereby bringing the very method of baseless character assassination which he now decries down upon himself–certainly seems to corroborate the theocon diktat that no matter how hard you work in America you can never wash away your blackness.

Now, presumably in an attempt to underscore that basic misunderstanding of the word “freedom”, Beck has launched an ill-fated attempt to defend that all-American tradition of blithely accusing someone of being a terrorist sympathiser, because they believe in a different bronze-age myth than you do.

Glenn ‘I’m not saying he’s racist, I’m just saying he has a problem with white culture’ Beck has mounted a legal challenge to Eiland-Hall, the registrar of http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com. Read all about it here: citmedialaw.org/threats/beck-v-eiland-hall and here: citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/2009-09-28-Eiland-Hall Response Brief.pdf

Beck claims in his UDRP complaint [to icann.org] that the domain name is confusingly similar to his trademark “Glenn Beck” and that Eiland-Hall has no rights or legitimate interests with respect to the domain name and registered it in bad faith.

http://www.jamesgardner.co.uk/

I for one would welcome the legal precedent a victory for Beck would set. Clearly, the people who registered http://www.jamesgardner.co.uk/ have set out to deliberately assume me to be a single man with a girl’s head and a midget for a grandmother.

Maybe someone should warn Kevin Rose, the evil genius behind digg.com that the legal floodgates are about to open and the years of offence they’ve caused to the spade and gardening tool manufacturing industry are almost at an end?

Perhaps Yahoo! should consider reimbursing the international yodelling association for having “no legitimate interest” in melodious hillside shouting?

Or maybe, just maybe, Glenn Beck is such a lying sack of Mormon shit, the only way he can avoid being reminded of his own absolute lack of journalistic integrity is to attack the people who point it out in a vein attempt to rescue what’s left of his ego from the bottom of the barrel he scraped it from.

Of course, what any rational person in Beck’s position should do, is take themselves away to a quiet location for a few weeks to think about what they’ve done, issue an apology for existing and go back to Yabbernothing AM radio, where they came from and belong—which I’d always rather naïvely presumed to be the cornerstone of Christian atonement and forgiveness these knuckleheads are waging such a vehemently bloody war fighting for in the first place? Shows what I know.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sun ditches Gordon Brown’s Labour Party

David Cameron’s forgone conclusion party were given a major boost in their bid to sit on the other side of the house of commons today, when the Sun (for want of a better word “news”) paper, owned by ultra conservative Australian Christian billionaire media magnate, Rupert ‘Barack Obama is a racist’ Murdoch, officially switched their allegiances to the Conservative party.

That’s right folks, today’s news headlies are that the richest man in media has decided to back a different horse.

Not that any of us have any idea what the Conservative party plan on actually doing any different to Labour. And what with Nick Clegg’s conference speech to the Liberal Democrats effectively resigning his party to another term of “didn’t they do well” consolatory nods to well-meaning policies without any explanation of how they’d pay for them, it looks like the man who gave the world Sky Television, Fox Network and, not least, his very own replicant, BBC hating, fact dodging, ultra-captolist son and heir, James Murdoch, it seems likely Mr. Rupert might just get the election result he wanted, yet-a-fucking-gain.

The Sun, for those who have to ask, resides at the classy end of scum journalism. Just occasionally prurient enough to be mildly amusing, but not beneath printing flat out lies about ZZ-list celebrities.

Known for its once cutting edge take on common sense conservatism (with a small ‘c’) The Sun has spent the last 12 years pretending there is a difference between Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson’s New Labour Party and the Old Tory Party of Thatcher and Major.

Meanwhile, genuinely motivated pragmatists, like Gordon Brown, have had to stand idly by, while everything other than what he actually said is mangled ad-nausia through the News Corp. mangle.

In 1986 Glenn Beck prank called the wife of a rival radio DJ because she’d had a miscarriage. Stay classy mister rapist murderer racist pituitary gland retard.

From salon.com:

A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right — about he can’t even have a baby.

Full story:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index2.html

“Fair and Balanced” Fox News producer caught on camera jeering up the 9/12 crowd

Real journalists go to university and study geopolitics and economic theory. They climb the greasy ladder of success by risking their lives in war-torn parts of the world, so we can sit back in our armchairs, tutting at the evening news headlies, saying, “What can I do about it?”

Heidi Noonan, an associate producer at Fox News, however, has had a slightly easier time of it. This patriotic young go-getter majored in cheerleading, before honing her skills as a rabble-rouser for the network which gave the world ‘Joe Millionaire’ and ‘American Idol’.

Not that Heidi Noonan hasn’t seen her fair share of real news reporting. Her first assignment was covering a good lo’ fashioned lynching and cook-out, which earned her a Murdoch Award for factual incitement to racial hatred.

Fair and Balanced? Fox News, you lie.