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comment by Manfred · 2017-01-13T22:04:19.928Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is, I think, the not-good kind of politics link.

Replies from: NatashaRostova, Vaniver, bogus, The_Jaded_One
comment by NatashaRostova · 2017-01-13T22:39:25.912Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As someone who wants more top-notch rationalist politics on LW, without moderators removing it, I think moderators should remove this.

comment by Vaniver · 2017-01-14T01:17:24.179Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is, I think, the not-good kind of politics link.

Agreed; it's gone.

comment by bogus · 2017-01-14T00:37:56.039Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Agreed; aside from the throwaway mention of the Dunning-Kruger effect in the title, there is no rationalism-worthy content here. The Open Thread is a far more appropriate place for these sorts of links.

comment by The_Jaded_One · 2017-01-13T22:39:24.912Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think it's because it's a partisan attack which also yields no interesting insights. I think the partisan nature might be excusable if there was something insightful in it.

comment by TiffanyAching · 2017-01-14T00:42:45.278Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Did I bring the weather with me or something? I've spent the last year stuffing my brain with content just like this. A large part of why I joined LW was to get away from it, because I realized that being so immersed in political discussion and argument was damaging me as a rationalist and a person. I started catching myself rationalizing, using arguments as soldiers, holding up applause lights, the works. I was chain-smoking political content, swinging between outrage and fear and team-cheering and disgusted fuck-it-all-anyway cynicism. It was making me anxious and miserable but it's so addictive.

It's not a coincidence that I've joined LW in January. One of my goals for this year was to force myself stick to a healthier "mental diet". Get my ass off twitter, seek out useful and enriching information, and strictly limit my intake of current political content.

LW seemed like a good place to do all of that. I joined on the understanding that current politics was a seldom-to-never thing here, and that if we wanted to discuss how rationality and politics intersect (valid and useful thing to do) we'd be using examples from the past or hypotheticals from the future.

Now in the five days since I've joined there have been a Brexit-post - worrying but arguably a justifiable exception given the content - and this, this useless article that taught me nothing new.

I'm a new member and I have no right to breeze in here and tell you guys how to run your show - but like I say, my brain is trying to eat healthy this year and I can't stay on this site if people are going to keep offering me cupcakes and telling me one won't kill me.

comment by The_Jaded_One · 2017-01-13T22:37:43.519Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What I dislike about this link is that I don't feel like I learned anything by reading it. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the past 12 months knows that Trump is full of bluster. Dunning-Kreuger is well known.

comment by ingive · 2017-01-13T20:28:06.266Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This article is an ad-hominem and straw man. Taking some random statements and implying the person in question thinks they know it all yet haven't implied so in X random statement, is definetly a case of dunning-kruger. Sad!

Replies from: The_Jaded_One
comment by The_Jaded_One · 2017-01-13T22:43:16.079Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think it's committing the ad-hominem fallacy.

To commit ad-hominem, you have to reject or attack an idea based on some quality of the person presenting the idea. This article didn't talk about Trump's ideas. I think it's what we'd call an "attack piece" or "hatchet job".

Replies from: ingive
comment by ingive · 2017-01-13T23:30:33.831Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You're technically right. I'm a bit uncertain on this one however, since the article does bring up his ideas regardless whether they sound "obviously wrong" to you and the author or not. Two times the author mention Mr. Trump's quotes on his IQ, intelligence, respectively, in such a way for a reader in its echo-chamber to think a certain way. Fake news!

comment by James_Miller · 2017-01-13T22:02:02.479Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How can you think that Trump doesn't suffer from greatly overestimating his own abilities, after all with no political background, with being thought a clown by the media, and with being hated by the Republican establishment he actually thinks he can be President, and I hear he intends to do it without spending much money. Furthermore, when told that there might be some kind of recording of him saying stuff that would sink any ordinary candidate he actually claims this that his persuasive skills were so good that he could survive even admitting that the tape was true. Finally, and get this, Trump even thinks that him winning the Presidency would cause U.S. financial markets to greatly rise and so merely electing him President would enrich America.

Replies from: The_Jaded_One
comment by The_Jaded_One · 2017-01-13T22:48:45.753Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

yeah very funny ;-D

But still, I am not 100% satisfied with Donny T. I feel like he would be better if he did his homework on certain important issues. Still it's early days.

comment by morganism · 2017-01-13T20:02:38.669Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"“Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology based on the results of a study he and a student, Justin Kruger, conducted at Cornell in 1999. As the title suggests, what they found was the existence of a cognitive bias in which the less able people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities. Or as Dunning put it recently over the phone from the University of Michigan, where he now teaches: “People don’t know what they don’t know.”

https://twitter.com/search?q=The%20Dunning%20Kruger%20President&src=typd

Replies from: Lumifer
comment by Lumifer · 2017-01-13T20:20:21.492Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So, LW now posts blatantly partisan links about the current political brouhaha in the US. Sigh...

Or as Dunning put it recently over the phone from the University of Michigan, where he now teaches: “People don’t know what they don’t know.”

Shouldn't he have attributed the quote to Rumsfeld and his "unknown unknowns"? X-/

And, of course, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a bit more complicated. For one thing, the actually competent people underestimate their abilities. The graph in the original paper looked at quartiles and the top quartile underestimated their competence.

You don't think that Trump is in the top quartile of the US population?

Replies from: morganism, gjm
comment by morganism · 2017-01-14T00:20:12.958Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Actually was thinking of the discussion last week on the fact that folks that don't know how complex a task was, tended to de-value the difficulty of the skill involved, guess i should have added it to that thread.

I thought that including the theorist in the article added some value to it, wasn't looking at the politics of it. Was also the only other pysch label i have seen assigned to him other than narcissist or worse.

comment by gjm · 2017-01-13T23:45:43.260Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

LW now posts blatantly partisan links [...]

LW is lots of people. Most of LW doesn't and you'll notice that the response to this has been consistently negative. morganism posts low-quality links all the time, unfortunately.

You don't think that Trump is in the top quartile of the US population?

He's clearly in the top quartile for many things. It's not at all clear that he is for all. And, while indeed Dunning-Kruger is more complicated than just "incompetent people think too highly of themselves", I also think it's more complicated than "top quartile underestimate themselves while below-median people overestimate themselves".