Dear John, list,
Thank you, John. That's an interesting article, I'm glad I read it. I'm
reminded of a book about Tausk and Freud that I read when I was young;
it was called _Talent and Genius_, and the author argued that talent is
the ability to recognize genius. It would be interesting if Dunning
tried to find people who are able to recognize people smarter than
themselves - I mean smarter at tasks in which all of them are engaged,
not just smarter-sounding through big words - and look for what such
smartness-recognizing people, if he can find them, have in common.
Ford Madox Ford somewhere wrote that the reason that it is difficult to
recognize excellent contemporary literature (i.e., literary art) is that
one's mind is filled with fads and fashions that one has not recognized
as mere fads and fashions yet. He said that literature is anything still
'readable' after 50 or 100 years. It's been a long time since I read it
but, by 'readable', I think he meant not only _/intelligible/_ but
_/esthetically tolerable/_. Of course he may have had a higher standard
of such readability than many of us have.
Anyway, the article makes enough sense that I think I need to change my
claim. If _/everybody/_ is inclined to self-overestimation in
intelligence (cf. Peirce's remark that everybody thinks himself (or
herself) to know enough about logic), then does anything remain of my
claim about a temptation biggest for the intelligent?
Magicians, when not performing for one another or for aficionados,
perform for audiences that usually lack special expertise about magic
tricks. Such an audience is outside its own area of knowledgeability and
consists of (A) those who don't know that they're out of their depth, or
don't realize just _/how/_ out of their depth they are, and (B) those
who know (or at least believe) that they're out of their depth.
Magicians have noticed, according to a magician whom I used to know
quite well, that Set A includes people who seem smart, seem to regard
themselves as smart, and try (sometimes desperately) to figure the trick
out, while set B includes the other people, who don't try to figure the
trick out and are not much impressed because, "well, you did it
somehow." Thus a magician is in the somewhat paradoxical position of
regarding some people as smart enough to be fooled or feel bewildered
(either way, it's when they get caught up in trying analyze and explain
the trick), and others as too stupid to be fooled or feel bewildered or,
to put it another way, too stupid to be as impressed as the magician
would like! To be sure, they're smart in a practical way. By 'fooled',
I mean, not by the fooled one's known unknowns but by the fooled one's
unknown unknowns.
When I think of that, I think of certain psychologists and physicists
who have been fooled by certain prestidigitators who have claimed
paranormal abilities - no names please. Everybody who cares about that
perennial debate knows where to go for names and arguments from either side.
It is not difficult in theoretical research to get beyond one's own
'turf' - for example an excellent biologist is not necessarily an
excellent statistician, and vice versa, and the more interdisciplinary
the research, the more it can become an issue. More generally, most of
us have gotten off of familiar turf in various ways at one time or
another, and, _/bolstered by the confidence and, for some of us, the
rewards, honors, etc., that we have gained in dealing with the more
familiar/_, have not taken sufficient account of where we are now, and
have hardly known what hit us.
So, I retract what I said about the method of status as being, among
inquirial methods of authority, "the biggest temptation of the
intelligent" and replace it with the idea that the method of status, and
of granting oneself too high a status of knowledgeability, is the
biggest temptation among the aforesaid methods tempting those trying for
a theoretical or hypothetical understanding that goes beyond the
familiar - but on the other hand, those seriously trying for a
theoretical or hypothetical understanding of unfamiliar things are
likelier to be smart and to rate themselves as even smarter (as most
people overrate themselves in intelligence, if Dunning's samples are
fairly representative).
Best, Ben
On 4/10/2014 4:05 PM, John Collier wrote:
Dear Ben, List,
Ben, I agree with most of what you say, but the last part on
self-authority goes somewhat against current research. For those
interested more, I include a link to a short news item. Apparently the
smartest among us are better at both self-evaluation and
self-criticism, but the less bright don't have this capacity.
At 09:11 PM 2014-04-09, Benjamin Udell wrote:
Among the methods of authority, perhaps the biggest temptation in
discovery research is the method of status, especially when it is a
method of _/self/ _-deception, such that one grants oneself a status
of greater knowledgeability, etc., than one fairly has; it's a
temptation of the intelligent; magicians find it easier to bewilder
or beguile 'smart' people than to do so with 'stupid' people, by whom
magicians mean, the people who are unimpressed and chuckle, "well,
you did it somehow" (but those people are obviously smart enough in
another way). As Feynman said, the person whom it is easiest for one
to fool is oneself. Peirce focuses, near the end of "Fixation," on
the closing of one's eyes or ears to the information or evidence that
might bring one the truth particularly when one should know better.
This closing of one's perception, in sometimes less guilty ways,
plays a particularly vulnerable role in the method of tenacity
because it is there unprotected by folds of authority or of
aprioristic emulation of some fermented paradigm; instead there is to
keep practicing and repeating one's initial opinion, it seems a bit
like the gambler's fallacy, boosted sometimes by some initial luck.
Well, practice and repetition of something that has shown _/some/ _
success is the core practical-learning method, not inevitably
infallibilistic, of artisans and more generally practitioners
productive and otherwise; to which method they add the appreciational
method of devotees (including the religious) - identification
(appreciation) and imitation (emulation) and, these days, the methods
of reflective disciplines as well (sciences, fine arts, etc.). What
I'm getting at is that some infallibilistic methods of inquiry can be
seen as misapplications, or at least as echoes, of methods that have
some validity outside of inquiry as the struggle to settle opinion,
and thus have validity in applications in inquiry (e.g., one needs to
keep _/in practice/ _ in doing math, etc.), as long as those
applications are not confused with inquiry itself. Anyway, one's
barring of one's own way to truth inhabits the core of all
infallibilistic inquiry. Perhaps one can reduce all logical sins to
this, as long as one remembers the difference between logical sin and
other logical errors, errors sometimes imposed on one.
Some excerpts
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/pure-genius/qa-why-40-of-us-think-were-in-the-top-5/?tag=nl.e660&s_cid=e660&ttag=e660&ftag=TRE4eb29b5
*Psychologist David Dunning explains that not only are we
terrible at seeing how stupid we are, but we're also too dumb to
recognize genius right in front of us.*
"One of my favorite examples is a study of the engineering departments
of software firms in the Bay Area in California. Researchers asked
individual engineers how good they were. In Company A 32% of the
engineers said they were in the top 5% of skill and quality of work in
the company. That seemed outrageous until you go to Company B, where
42% said they were in the top 5%. So much for being lonely at the top.
Everybody tends to think that they are at the top much more than they
really are."
"People do what they can conceive of, but sometimes there are better
solutions, or considerations and risks they never knew were out there.
They don’t take a solution they don’t know about. If there is a risk
they do not know about, they don’t prepare for it. There are any
number of unknown unknowns that we are dealing with whenever we face a
challenge in life."
"*Your recent work surrounds genius. Specifically the fact that we
cannot recognize a genius even when they are right in front of us?
* Our past research was about poor performers and how they did not
have the skills to recognize their shortcomings. Well, ultimately, we
found out that that is true for everybody. It’s a problem we all have.
We might recognize poor performers because we outperform them. The
problem is we do not see mistakes we are making. But people who are
more competent than us, they can certainly see our mistakes. Here is
the twist: For really top performers we cannot recognize just how
superior their responses, or their strategy is, or their thinking is.
We cannot recognize the best among us, because we simply do not have
the competency to be able to recognize how competent those people are."
He also has some suggestions for what to do when one finds oneself in
a lop-sided situation, as well as how to get outide of the the problem
of self-evaluation.
John
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professor John Collier [email protected]
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South
Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
<http://web.ncf.ca/collier>
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