Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc
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@tinuviel said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
This runs the risk of having one's self being misunderstood as cowardly, or plagued with indecision. When one has a fact at one's disposal and has researched it properly, confidence in delivery is as much a part of overcoming imposter syndrome as actually knowing the fact (Wilkinson, 2020).
For me things generally break down in two categories.
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Things I can veritably prove to myself. For instance I can run the calculation for 2+4=6 or write a program to solve the problem at hand and have high confidence that the result is provably correct.
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Things where I can only have have a probabilistic estimate for how true they are. For instance what color is the sky? How far away is the moon? Does my country qualify as a democracy? These are not things I'm in a position to test myself so I rely on my understanding of my sources, my ability to remember those sources and the accuracy of those sources to begin with.
In the vast majority of circumstances something is discussed online, it'll be something falling under the second bucket. It's usually only when someone is being dumb about something that's easily mathematically proven or trivially sourced that the first one is applicable.
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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@groth I'm not paying much attention here, sorry. But it sounds as if you would enjoy studying epistemology in some formal with-the-philosophy-department kinda way.
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I keep coming back to Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism and 'the false notion that Democracy means my ignorance is just as valid as your knowledge'. And Sagan's 'Death of Expertise'.
Information is now so freely available and accessible like never before. And the biggest problem, IMO, with the algorithm nature of searching for that information is that it generally leads towards sources that are biased to a particular point of view, based on your search history. Society has information, but no general training in how to analyze or contextualize it.
Example: Science.
The general public isn't trained in the process of the Scientific Method, much less the actual science. There's no aware ness of the final steps in 'science': publish results in a peer reviewed format and peer replication of the results. If no-one else can reproduce your results following the same procedures you outlined, it's not an actual 'fact' yet; just a result that invites further investigation. Example: all the attempts at cold fusion over the decades that have been non-replicatable. Further, there are 'science journals' that are deliberately biased towards certain conclusions. Like 'medical' journals funded by anti-abortioinists that publish all the BS like 'fetal heartbeat at 6 weeks' propaganda.
We have more information freely available to humanity than ever before. But it's just as important that we know how to understand the information presented to us. How to separate out the facts from the opinions that are presented as 'facts'.
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@runescryer said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
We have more information freely available to humanity than ever before. But it's just as important that we know how to understand the information presented to us. How to separate out the facts from the opinions that are presented as 'facts'.
This is substantially true. Additionally, the opportunity to be presented with opposing views that challenge of own are increasingly more difficult to come across -- ranging from the communities we live in, work in, subscribe into, etc.
Increasingly we encounter strawmen caricatures of actual opposing viewpoints, which acts to our disservice -- we lose the ability to rationally engage with opposition, and fail to correct the parts of our own foundational understandings that require refinement because they are, at best incomplete, at worst... worse.
-r
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@il-volpe
I love the idea of formally studying philosophy, trouble is I can't write an essay to save my life.I actually have one big mental hangup that isn't IK nor IP which I don't know the proper name for, it's this.
I really struggle with the idea that after being presented with the same statements/facts, someone else can come to a different conclusion then me. I sometimes watch these people solve puzzles and it's fascinating to me how often it happens that they'll quickly solve something I can't see the solution for at all and then struggle for minutes with something I saw instantly.
It comes up in discussions in the form that I don't understand why someone else doesn't have the same understanding as me. Actually this is one of the reasons I don't do well writing essays because I struggle with determining the difference between which assumptions need to be stated/cited explicitly and which do not.
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@runescryer That's all a big part of why, I think, there's so much COVID skepticism going around. It's one of the first times, for the general public, that we're seeing science being done in real time. People in labcoats aren't sequestered away for months in a lab and then come back with a result, we see all the mistakes, the foibles of the process.
That and the fact that media companies care more about clicks and readership than they do actually making sure what they're saying is the entirety of the truth.
He/Him
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@runescryer said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
We have more information freely available to humanity than ever before. But it's just as important that we know how to understand the information presented to us. How to separate out the facts from the opinions that are presented as 'facts'.
And liberal arts degrees, the programs that are most devoted to critical thinking, are becoming less and less regarded. I have met so many engineers who consider themselves smart and can math and design an efficient system thoroughly, but couldn't figure a way out of a wet paper bag. Get them out of their wheelhouse and they are complete morons.
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I think that given the current state of academic journals, no education is going to give anyone outside the specific field a reasonable chance to gauge which conclusions are well supported and which are not.
Unless you are active in that field, how are you supposed to tell how reputable the journal is, how well designed the study was, to which extent the data was massaged to reach the 'right' conclusion.
In theory, that is where science reporting is supposed to come in. Problem is as mentioned by previous posters that their financial incentive isn't accuracy, it is eyeballs. Science reporting is almost exclusively geared towards writing about 'exciting' or 'ground breaking' discoveries which you almost never hear about again because they turned out to be non-replicable.
That is why it is a good thing most countries have agencies like the CDC where experts in the field try to maintain a knowledge base of the current state of the art.
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@tinuviel said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
@runescryer That's all a big part of why, I think, there's so much COVID skepticism going around. It's one of the first times, for the general public, that we're seeing science being done in real time. People in labcoats aren't sequestered away for months in a lab and then come back with a result, we see all the mistakes, the foibles of the process.
And that science changes actions on the basis of new data. I'm sitting here listening to a lecture on how we know what is true and what is not - I'm told Plato defined it as justified true belief, and Descartes was struct by falsehoods he accepted (this lecture is the WORST). But what that lack of knowledge into how science works means that the specialists in the field keep being told "well, that isn't what you all said a year ago" - yes, a year ago, it was accepted this was droplet, and now it is airborne, which means hands matter less and air matters a lot...
As well as that, a lot of recent effort in the UK has gone into devaluing experts and education that provides people with basic critical thinking skills. Liberal arts etc, for example (as @ominous says). Even in my field, the push from the external forces is towards task-based skills rather than critical thinking (which might be a good thing in nurses, yanno?).
That and the fact that media companies care more about clicks and readership than they do actually making sure what they're saying is the entirety of the truth.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, some of the media companies care more about the money and power than the truth. (I'm currently a fan of byline press which is reporting with brutal honesty the state of the UK right now).
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@jinshei said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
As well as that, a lot of recent effort in the UK has gone into devaluing experts and education that provides people with basic critical thinking skills. Liberal arts etc, for example (as @ominous says). Even in my field, the push from the external forces is towards task-based skills rather than critical thinking (which might be a good thing in nurses, yanno?).
We can't have the meat-based assembly line robots thinking for themselves. They might realize they're just a stopgap until the plastic and metal robots are able to take their place.
Then again, my two best friends are professors of anatomy and their students, who are almost all trying to get into nursing, are for the most part complete idiots. If we set the bar for nursing students to "able to think critically," our nursing shortage is going to get a lot fucking worse than it already is real fucking quick. We just don't value education much anymore if we ever did. Kids blow off learning in school then they get to college and college drops their standards, because failing half of your students is equal to losing half of your paying customers. Accreditation is a joke, because universities will just switch to a different accreditation agency. The only things you can rely on really are standardized tests and we're doing our best to eliminate those too for equity reasons.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@ominous said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
@jinshei said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
As well as that, a lot of recent effort in the UK has gone into devaluing experts and education that provides people with basic critical thinking skills. Liberal arts etc, for example (as @ominous says). Even in my field, the push from the external forces is towards task-based skills rather than critical thinking (which might be a good thing in nurses, yanno?).
We can't have the meat-based assembly line robots thinking for themselves. They might realize they're just a stopgap until the plastic and metal robots are able to take their place.
I mean, I don't disagree on any given point here but I would argue we are cheaper (increasingly so) than robots and thus less valuable.
Then again, my two best friends are professors of anatomy and their students, who are almost all trying to get into nursing, are for the most part complete idiots. If we set the bar for nursing students to "able to think critically," our nursing shortage is going to get a lot fucking worse than it already is real fucking quick.
I'm setting the graduation bar at critical thinking - we don't receive them like that!
I also teach prescribing and there my level is "I am giving this person a licence to kill; do I trust that they won't actually do so from lack of thinking or knowledge?". The ones that don't pass are those that treat the knowledge and critical thinking element of the course as a tickbox they are entitled to pass; They are classic D-K, because they believe they know it all already and are already experts. The ones that do pass demonstrate their understanding of how little we know and how important further knowledge or clinical studies are.
