New T-Shirt Idea
By @edent
· t-shirt WeekNotes · 1 comment · 300 words · read ~221 times.
Some days, I want everyone on the Internet to wear this t-shirt:
Designed using Guillaume Chabot's tool after the original 2K by Gingham - which has been parodied many times.
Explaining the joke
The Dunning–Kruger effect is - simply put - when people of low ability are over-confident in their ability.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is less easy to put simply.
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
The actual joke
Dunning and Kruger are two separate people - David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Murray Gell-Mann was a single person.
The actual actual joke
Look, it has been a long few months. It's hard reading news stories that you know are untrue. It makes you question everything you think you know. And then you wonder whether you actually understand anything.
It's even harder seeing your friends and colleagues retweeting stuff which is painfully wrong - and not being allowed to put the record straight.
Trying to create a "fail fast" culture is difficult. It hurts. But it is necessary.
Eric Andersen says:
The more often wrong things are repeated, the easier it is to believe they are true. Or so some believe if you count to the number of times a lie is repeated. So often the repeated lies are spoken by someone with a huge bully pulpit and a receptive audience.
I don't know the answer; I wish I did.