Month: October 2006

It several years old, but this story about a study of how poor performers evaluated themselves keeps popping up in Del.cio.us and more-or-less confirms my earlier speculations about the poor self-monitoring skills that some people seem to have.

David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell, and Justin Kruger, then a graduate student at Cornell, tested subjects on logic, English grammar and humor, and then asked the subjects to rate how well they did.

For people in the top who scored above the 25th percentile, their ratings were positively correlated with their actually performance — i.e., the middling to high performs had a fairly good idea of whether they had performed middling or well. But those in the bottom quartile tended to greatly over-estimate how well they had performed.

According to The New York Times,

Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.

Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to “identify grammatically correct standard English,” and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.

The high achiever actually tended to underestimate their performance, but once the researchers gave them some idea of how others had performed by having the subjects assist in grading the tests of others, they tended to accurately rate their own performance. Oddly enough, after assisting in grading the tests of others, the low performers had a tendency to overestimate even further their own performance.

One explanation is that self-evaluation requires the very skills, such as logical reasoning, that the poor performers are lacking in. But there’s another interesting possible factor,

In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out “You stink!”– truthful though this assessment may be.

As I’ve said before, the key to success in life is not to bullshit yourself.

Source:

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find. Erica Goode, The New York Times, January 18, 2006.

Alton Verm, and his 15 year old daughter Diana, took a lot of heat on various sites earlier this month after they objected to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which Diana had been assigned to read for school.

Alton didn’t help his case by telling The Courier of Montgomery County that he wanted the book removed from the school district’s library even though he hadn’t actually read the book.

On the other hand, what both Diana and Alton objected to was not the story itself but rather the “very bad language”, as Diana put it, that Bradbury used.

It has been years since I’ve read Fahrenheit 451, but apparently the words “damn” and “hell” are used a number of times in the book. In fact, according to the Wikipedia entry on the book, in 1967 the book’s publisher released an abridged version of the book specifically for the education market that omitted the instances of these words. The changes were apparently made without Bradbury’s knowledge.

And, frankly, I think Alton’s got an interesting point on that language,

Alton Verm said he doesn’t understand how the district can punish students for using bad language, yet require them to read a book with bad language as part of a class.

Hmm…perhaps the district doesn’t punish kids who say “damn” or “hell”? Or are those words okay in speech and books but, say, a text that liberally used “fuck” would not be?

A lot of banned book stories involving books assigned to kids tend to make the parents look like idiots, but often there’s a lot more going on below the surface.

For example, this story tells about parents who are angry that their children were assigned to read a modern translation of Gilgamesh as part of a 10th grade class.

Gilgamesh? WTF? Who would object to Gilgamesh? Bunch of fundie nutcases, right? Here are some excerpts from the translation (dug up by a commenter here) describing the prostitute Shamhat seducing Endiku,

She stripped off her robe and lay there naked,
with her legs apart, touching herself
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close, Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her,
until he had had enough. At last
he stood up and walked toward the waterhole
to rejoin his animals. But the gazelles
saw him and scattered, the antelope and deer
bounded away. He tried to catch up,
but his body was exhausted, his life-force was spent,
his knees trembled, he could no longer run
like an animal, as he had before.
He turned back to Shamhat, and as he walked
he knew that his mind had somehow grown larger,
he knew things now that an animal couldn’t know.

There are other sexually explicitly portions of the book, including one which the author has one character express the desire to “suck” another character’s “rod.”

Um, yeah, okay. I’m with the nutty Texan mother who objects — I wouldn’t want my daughter reading that in 10th grade either (especially since one of any number of sexually graphic scenes in this particular translation was photocopied by the teacher and passed out for special attention and discussion, so it’s not like the teacher was reading around the sexually explicit portions of the text).

Sources:

Parents protest addition to epic. Matthew Ralph, Gloucester County Times, October 9, 2006.

Parent criticizes book ‘Fahrenheit 451’. Kassia Micek, The Courier of Montgomery County, October 17, 2006.