waider

I've been reading this paper that tongodeon referred to recently: "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Grossly paraphrasing, the authors are attempting to prove that the dumber you are, the less likely you are to realise that you're dumb. The paper's interesting, even if the statistical notation is beyond me, but I do like the style. In addition to the whole bit about asking comedians to rate jokes in order to establish a baseline, there's this:

Participants. Four to six weeks after Phase 1 of Study 3 was completed, we invited participants from the bottom- ( n = 17) and top-quartile ( n = 19) back to the laboratory in exchange for extra credit or $5. (my emphasis)

I like that. I don't know if it's par for the course when you're explaining how you motivated people into participating in your study, but it certainly amuses me to see it put that bluntly.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I've actually learned something useful out of this aside from the main theme of the paper: the "false-consensus effect". This is where you underestimate something like your percentile rating on a test because you're assuming that your peers were at least able to get the same things right that you did. This has interesting implications in, for example, my line of work where I'm unconciously drawing on more than ten years of messing about with Unix systems; things that seem obvious to me, and which I assume others have already accounted for, may not in fact have been addressed at all. Mind you, I was already kinda taking that approach anyway.

...it appears that my amblyopia could have been caused due to late correction of constant unilateral strabismus in the left eye (the lazy one), although the amblyopia page suggests that the critical period is up to six years of age, and I underwent surgery for the strabismus when I was 2 and a half. You can still see the scars on my left eyeball, too!

An interesting mailing list entry on design decisions at Microsoft. This sort of vindicates my theory that they're not all clueless morons in the software department, just victims of large-system effects like unpredictable interactions of unrelated components.