The Nature of Things

Listening to the morning news programs on NPR over the weekend, I was interested to hear two separate interviews with the actor Robert Duvall. Duvall, who is 79, has a new movie coming out called "Get Low". In it, he plays a hermit, Felix Bush, who has lived the life of a misunderstood exile in a cabin in the woods for some forty years. Now he has come out of the woods to contact the local funeral director, played by Bill Murray, to plan his own "funeral party". The film is actually based on a real-life story of a hermit in Tennessee. The events took place in 1938. In both of the interviews that I heard, Duvall made the point that there is a direct arc between his first role in the movies, Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird", and that of the hermit Felix Bush. Boo Radley was a shy, sensitive, emotionally fragile man who was not able to deal with society. Felix Bush is, apparently, almost an older version of that man - a loner, a man who cannot be ...

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...