Lessons Learned?

What can be drawn from this recent election that speaks to America? To listen to the bombast, this election is all about money. Who has it, where it comes from, what it’s to be spent on, when to cut it off. An angry electorate looking at massive job loss and all that that implies tossed out the previous majority in Congress over money. This is not difficult to understand. People are frightened that they will no longer be able to pay their bills, keep their homes, send their children to college. Basic stuff. Two years into the current regime and foreclosures are still high, unemployment still high, fear level still high, and the only bright spot concerns people who are seemingly so far removed from such worries as to be on another plain of existence. The stock market has been steadily recovering over the last two years. Which means the economy is growing. Slowly. Economic forecasters talking on the radio go on and on about the speed of the recovery and what it means for jobs. Out of the other end of the media machine, concern over illegal immigrants and outsourcing are two halves of the same worry. Jobs are going overseas, and those that are left are being filled by people who don’t even belong here. The government has done nothing about either—except in Arizona, where a law just short of a kind of fascism has been passed, and everyone else has been ganging up on that state, telling them how awful they are. And of course seemingly offering nothing in place of a law that, for it’s monumental flaws, still is something. [More . . . ]

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More on the Dunning-Kruger cognitive bias

Over the past year, this website has published several posts discussing the Dunning-Kruger cognitive bias, and for good reason. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the cognitive bias that naturally comes to mind whenever one thinks of America's tumultuous politics. It especially comes to mind when one considers the rise of the American "Tea Party," notable for producing politicians who are factually clueless but oblivious to this fact. That combination is the essential nature of the Dunning Kruger phenomenon, as described by Wikipedia:

Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis. Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill; 2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others; 3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; 4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

I thought it worthwhile to raise this topic of Dunning-Kruger again tonight, and to further note that in 2005, David Dunning published a book on the Dunning-Kruger effect called Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself. You can read the first chapter of Dunning's book online at this link. Here are a few excerpts: [From page 8]

The notions people have about their skills and knowledge are far from perfect indicators of their actual proficiency… Impressions of skill are somehow decoupled from reality-perhaps not completely but tune extent that is surprising.… People who are incompetent are often not in a position to know that they are incompetent. Judgment of self is an intrinsically difficult task, and the incompetent just do not have the tools necessary to meet this difficult challenge, nor should the rest of us expect them to.

[Space 12]

In 1914, Babinski coined the term now used, anosognosia, to describe these cases in which people are physically or neurologically impaired, sometimes grossly, yet fail to recognize the death or even the existence of their impairment… I take the notion osanosognosia and transfer it, by analogy, from the neurological and physical realm to the cognitive and psychological one.

[Page 13]

It is not that people performing poorly fail to recognize their incompetence. Instead, our argument is that people performing poorly cannot be expected to recognize their ineptitude. They are simply not in a position to know that they are doing badly. The ability to recognize the death of their inadequacies is beyond them.… They are doubly cursed: in many areas of life, the skills necessary to produce competent responses to the outside world are also the exact same skills needed to recognize whether one acted competently. . . the skills needed to perform the cognitive task . . . are the same exact ones necessary for metacognitive (judging the response).

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That psychopath in the mirror

In the September/October 2010 edition of Scientific American Mind, I recently read an article titled "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath," by Kent Kiehl and Joshua W Buckholtz. Who are psychopaths? The authors claim that psychopaths are people whose brains have "gone wrong." They claim that psychopaths make up .5 to 1% of the general population, adding up to 250,000 psychopaths living freely in the United States. They offer a list of criteria for determining whether a person is a psychopath, mentioning that "everyone falls somewhere on the psychopathic continuum." What are the basic symptoms?

One of the most striking peculiarities of psychopaths is that they lack empathy; they are able to shake off as mere tinsel the most universal social obligations. They lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets-in fact, they don't feel particularly deeply about anything at all. So much for the way regular people make sense of the world is through emotion. It informs our gut decisions, our connections to people and places, our sense of belonging and purpose. It is almost impossible to imagine life without findings-until you meet a psychopath. But psychopaths often cover up their deficiencies with a ready and engaging charm, so it can take time to realize what you are dealing with.
Fair enough, but I'd like to focus on that idea that all of us fall along this continuum. [More . . .]

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The reason Democrats might lose is they aren’t partisan enough

Recent polls show that a majority of voters admire candidates which don’t compromise on issues. When we look at the recent political history of compromise within the Democratic Party, we may discern a major source of voter discontent with Democratic candidates in the upcoming November elections. Recently, US House and Senate Democrats failed to call up for a vote the expiration of Bush era tax breaks for the wealthiest of Americans. According to a recent CNN poll, 69% of Americans support having the Bush era tax breaks for the ultra-rich expiring on January 1, 2011. Republicans adopted an “all or nothing” approach which clearly favored the wealthiest Americans and which Republican approach would have taken away Middle Class Tax Cuts from the Democrats’ Stimulus Plan and given them to the ultra-rich to the tune of $731 billion. The increase in the total national debt of $13.64 trillion from the Republican plan from continuing these tax cuts alone would be 5.4%. The White House also has adopted a “compromise with ‘yourself’” approach in an attempt to garner Republican support for issues even though the GOP has not supported anything put forth by the Democrats during the Obama Presidency. Witness the pre-legislative demise of the “public option” in health care which is still favored by a majority of Americans. Many Democratic candidates are running away from their votes for healthcare reform when according to a recent Pew Center study a majority of voters and large majorities of Democratic and Independent voters support those who voted for healthcare reform. So, while many believe that the “partisanship” of politics is destructive, it is clear that holding the line on your policies is more favorably viewed by voters than any type of compromise. Democrats are likely to learn a very costly lesson in the value of “NO!” come November, 2010. But, the lesson will mostly inform any future minority in the US House or Senate that obstruction and obfuscation are more valuable than compromise, even when a majority of voters support the other side of an issue.

Continue ReadingThe reason Democrats might lose is they aren’t partisan enough