The findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are.

Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people.

Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.

So there.

Lined up on shelves, there are sections of everyone’s life clearly documented, maybe labeled. There are reservoirs of memories just waiting to be have their damns burst. Turn open the spigot and drown in the past.

My generation is living online. Our lives being documented in ever more disparate venues; our devices capturing every inane moment, sharing it, pushing it out and notifying everyone of what just happened, who was there, where it was. When romantic comedies are written about the next decade, endearing scenes of a hero’s family sharing his misadventures with the romantic interest will soon take place huddled around the mother’s Facebook account.

I’ve never had the stomach for it.

I don’t think we capture the right moments. The camera flashes and we pose. We pose. We create moments as artificial as the memory we want of them. We stare into lenses and lie, if only a little, so that the record shows we were there, enjoying or not enjoying ourselves, in precisely the way we’d prefer it.

But the perfect moments always allude us. The moments when we get the joke; when we decide; when we falter; the moments right before we succeed, right before we fail, before we’re sure. You can’t capture what you don’t expect, and so many of the things we should cherish are precisely the things we wouldn’t want a camera to see.

There is value to photography. Historical, candid, and artistic, they are evidence of what we’ve done, who we’ve known, where we’ve been. They are fragments we can stitch back together to form a narrative of our lives, however shallow and partial.

But I want no part in them. I don’t want to stare at some photo of me at 21 when I’m 50 and contemplate everything I was, or could have been. I don’t want to have to drown in partial truths, grasping at a falling memory to paint in details. I’d rather either remember, or not. Rather know, or forget. I’d rather be able to molt my life as it goes, letting the useless bits drop away as the important becomes more dear.

When I reach backwards into my life, I want to know what I find to have been defining. To have been something I couldn’t shake, couldn’t let go of. I want to forget the pointless birthday parties, and the group shots at the bars where so-and-so is making that face she makes, and I’m half-drunk, and look that’s what’s his face that guy who dated whoever that is. I want to reach and find the things I couldn’t photograph: the moments I knew, the moments we forgot; the street sign all lit up with sun as our car drove towards home; the view of the skyline when I left; the dodge balls as they barreled towards me; the way it felt to run in the rain, drunk and mad, screeching towards the bar like a five-year old on a sugar high.

I’d rather be able to forget, so that I can remember.

What we found over time was that there is a lot of really good talent in that pool, which the industry had overlooked. Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades & the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered.

We started to ask “What if the college degree itself is not really that useful? What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?”

I landed my first professional job at 16, a high school drop-out without as much as a GED. Still don’t have one, and I’m hitting my 28th spin around the sun this summer.

Now that I own my own company, I’ve found myself not only completely ignoring education on resumes, but there’s an odd part of me that, when seeing a person with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, thinks, Wait, you had to go to school for this?

Which is an utterly asinine thing to think. But the neurons fire and I sneer a bit and wonder what they spent all that time learning.

I’ve had kids start with bachelor’s and while they tend to have a bit more experience building useless but interesting things, in the trenches they’re about even with the kids we’ve had that taught themselves code while they were busy trying to create something else. The school bound kids are generally more polished; better work habits, better code habits, less of a language barrier when I’m laying out the structure of what I want them to pull off. But after three months or so I’ve beaten the worst bits out of them and the differences are negligible at best.

I’d never say education is useless, but I stick firmly to the idea that how you get it doesn’t matter.

Thanks for the link, Gary, and thank you Deb for that first job.

Because nature is awesome.

It sees to me that while people do vary in conformity, this variation is less in how much folks care about others’ evaluations, and more about which others they care about. “Conformists” tend to care about a common standard status audience – a usual mix of people weighted by a standard status. “Non-conformists,” in contrast, “march to the beat of a different drummer” by caring about non-standard status audiences.

The most interesting folks I know care very much about the opinions of others. It’s just often that the “others” aren’t anyone I know.

“We’ve done it,” said senior producer Julie Snyder, who was personally interviewed for a 2003 This American Life episode, “Going Eclectic,” in which she described what it’s like to be a bilingual member of the ACLU trained in kite-making by a Japanese stepfather. “There is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that we have not exhaustively documented and grouped by theme.”

Thanks for the laugh at the expense of everything I hold dear, Jason.

Absolutely brilliant idea.

Many philanthropists have funded research into diseases they themselves have been diagnosed with. But Brin is likely the first who, based on a genetic test, began funding scientific research in the hope of escaping a disease in the first place.

Two things stuck with me.

Despite the inane Gattaca-inspired fear over the implications of genetic testing, the march towards using our genes as scientific palm readers is progressing:

People told that they were at dramatically higher risk for developing Alzheimer’s later in life seemed to process the information and integrate it into their lives, often choosing to lead more healthy lifestyles.

Second is the notion of applying raw computing power to large data sets to mine insights into disease:

It’s hard to overstate the difference between this approach and conventional research. “Traditionally, an experiment with 10 or 20 subjects was big,” says the Parkinson’s Institute’s Langston. “Then it went up to the hundreds. Now 1,000 subjects would be a lot—so with 10,000, suddenly we’ve reached a scale never seen before. This could dramatically advance our understanding.”

In the business of changing lives, the straight path is rarely the best one. A.A. illustrates that even in an age of scientific advance, it is still ancient insights into human nature that work best.

Only that’s not what the article, or even a shred of scientific evidence suggests.

While there is a good deal of conflicting data tossed about in regards to the success rate of A.A, the most widely cited, criticized, and defended are statistics from a paper published for A.A.’s internal use in 1990, Comments on A.A’s Triennial Surverys, which puts the programs success rate at around 5%.

The same rate as that of spontaneous remission.

The original Wired article glosses over the paper (and countless others), choosing instead to mention a single Stanford paper which shows a slight advantage to the A.A. program. In fact, the 5% statistic is mentioned in passing as a joke:

The group’s “cure rate” has been estimated at anywhere from 75 percent to 5 percent, extremes that seem far-fetched.

With no explanation as to why it’s so far fetched.

It can be said that no study exists which fairly invalidates A.A. as a treatment for alcoholism. But it’s just as easy to turn that around and point out that no study, single, meta or otherwise, fairly validates it either.

Meanwhile, we have scientific evidence that Varenicline Tartrate, marketed as Chantix™ by Pfizer, improves the chances of someone quitting smoking for one year from 8% to 22%.

In the age of scientific advance, science beats hokey wisdom every time.

Thanks, Jeffrey.

Though, honestly, who tests for IE6 anymore?

If Kant’s argument has some merit, then the key concern about how non-rational beings are treated is how such treatment affects the behavior of the person engaging in said behavior. So, for example, if being cruel to a real dog could damage a person’s humanity, then he should (as Kant sees it) not be cruel to the dog. This should also extend to virtual beings.

It never occurred to me to leave Dogmeat safe at home, though I would immediately reload to a saved game whenever he was killed.

So maybe I’m not all bad.

Meanwhile, at the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, M.S. doesn’t have high hopes that exactly the same thing won’t happen again:

We don’t know whether the Deepwater Horizon blowout would have been prevented by a second blind shear ram, but it might have helped. If we actually care about preventing another such disaster, we’ll begin an immediate programme to get a second blind shear ram on every single drilling platform anywhere near American waters.

But I have a feeling we’re not going to do that… As a society, I’d bet, we’re going to decide that we don’t actually care as much about poisoning our oceans and our coastlines and befouling our planet with black crud as we do about the money it would cost to make it less likely.

I’d love to disagree, but I don’t know that I can.

Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the “oldest old” have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast.

There are entire paragraphs of this article I could quote here. Sections I’ve now re-read a dozen times, over the last few days. But it’s the honesty of the piece that sits with you, and outside of the full context of the piece, excerpts may read offensively, or distantly.

Just know it’s a difficult thing to read, but worth the effort.

It is not sex work that society fears is dangerous, but sex workers in and of themselves. To many, I am dangerous. There is something wrong with me to have been capable of doing – freely and upon my own volition – something that any intelligent, decent woman would apparently never even consider doing. This something that is wrong with me, this logic clearly implies, is something that was there prior to my becoming a sex worker—something that which will remain forever.

Something that disqualifies me from working with children.

Thanks, Patrick.

My parents had the moon. Before that, there was the west. And before that, America. Do we have any frontiers left? Frontiers exist for one reason: promise. Where do we go now to find promise? What direction? We are a people hungry for something to believe in.

“For them, this Catholic institution is their only family,” Vian wrote. “And they decide to save it at any cost.”

Interesting how, when cornered, the opponents of nuclear power inevitably have to dip into the doomsday scenario.

Thanks, Andrew.

Our brains are weird.