Self-delusion

One thing struck me about this scenario:

"Imagine you are very good at a particular game.

Pick anything – chess, Street Fighter, poker – doesn’t matter.

You play this game with friends all the time, and you always win. You get so good at it, you start to think you could win a tournament.

You get online and find where the next regional tournament is; you pay the entrance fee and get your ass handed to you in the first round.

It turns out, you are not so smart. All this time, you thought you were among the best of the best, but you were really just an amateur. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s a basic element of human nature."

It reminds me of the 8 gazillion grad school applicants who do not seem to understand that even though they write good Jane Austen essays by the standards of undergrads at Random State University, they really don't have a chance at a top tier PhD program.

I'll also just note that there is a debate in this literature about whether some (or all) of the finding that the least competent tend to be over-confident about their ability or knowledge and the most competent tend to be under-confident arises due to a statistical or methodological artifact of the research. My guess is that even when you correct for unreliable measurement, regression to the mean, etc., there is still a tendency for the big fish in the small pond to fail to recognize just how small that pond really is. But I am less willing than the author to endorse the proposition that this effect is a basic element of human nature. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what this relative lack of certainty indicates about my knowledge of judgment and decision-making vis-a-vis his. Hah.

My brother in law made me aware of this blog through this post. I thought it was interesting, and I agree with the general premise that people compete for status through their purchasing behavior and that counter-cultural tastes do not buck capitalism in any way. I did find it rather quaint (read: dumb) to believe that back in the good old days, "there was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used and lived in" because stuff was made by hand (I like making stuff by hand, but hellooo magical thinking), and I couldn't see how this was relevant to the larger point of the article.