The Nature of Things

The wonderful Dahlia Lithwick of the online magazine Slate has a very perceptive and funny piece in the magazine today called "Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types."   It's worth your time to go and read the whole article but here's the capsule version. Lithwick maintains that human beings can be categorized as either one of two kinds of Muppets: Chaos Muppets or Order Muppets. As one who grew up with my children as they watched Sesame Street and learned their ABCs, colors, numbers, shapes, and much else from the Muppets, I have to say that her theory makes a whole lot of sense to me. Chaos Muppets are out-of-control, emotional, volatile. They tend toward the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects, and the letter C. Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and—paradigmatically—Animal, are all Chaos Muppets. Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet. So, I must tell you, is Jus...

Have you hear of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Well, neither had I until today, but now that I have, I must say I think it explains quite a lot. I came across a discussion of the effect in a blog that I follow called Skeptical Science . It's a blog that explains sometimes very complicated scientific concepts in relatively easy-to-understand layman's (or laywoman's) terms. Dunning and Kruger are two Nobel Prize winning scientists who wrote a scientific paper for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments." I love that title and it pretty much says it all. The "effect," as I understand it, is that the more unskilled or unaware an individual is, the more likely his/her assessment of his/her own abilities is likely to be inflated and not consistent with reality. Conversely, as one's skills and knowledge level increase...