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Anybody out there old enough to remember The Peter Principle? Or am I the oldest guy left? Laurence Johnston Peter, a man with two first names, one at the beginning and one at the end and his last name in the middle, wrote a whole book explaining that people in a company or bureaucracy get promoted until they’re finally at a level where they can’t be promoted any higher because they’re just past the upper limit of their competence. And there they remain, at their pinnacle of mediocrity. It was a big hit. He wrote a sequel called The Peter Plan that no one liked. No one wants plans. They want descriptions of what the problems are, confirming their constant complaints.
I posted an old article on social media from Scientific American that claimed to debunk the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which will hereafter be referred to as DKE. DKE says, according to the popular reading of it, that incompetent people don’t have enough expertise to be aware of how incompetent they really are. The less competent in a field of endeavor one is, the more wildly overconfident one is likely to be. The English have a specific name for this type of buffoon: the cockwomble.
The Scientific American article was immediately attacked by commenters on my post. They didn’t appreciate the joke I hoped I was making: that DKE was the result of Dunning and Kruger handling their data wrong and being wildly overconfident about the results. Ha ha! The commenters had what seemed to me an inordinately strong attachment to DKE.
For some reason their allegiance amused me. I’m a bit fascinated by the concepts and statistical and social science research we tend to accept when it supports what we like to believe.
If there was one thing about The Enlightenment that enabled and helped perpetuate racism, slavery, and conquest, it was adopting the cartesian idea that, given enough information, anything could be quantified. Pascal ran with that idea to apply it to probabilities. Leibnitz and Newton, to the volumes of irregular shapes and other complex calculations. Categorization got to be a big trend, especially with Linnaeus and his biological taxonomy. Early Enlightenment Science ate up these ideas and developed mathematical criteria for categorizing human beings, as individuals or in groups, focusing on differences in temperament, inclinations, intellectual, emotional, behavioral, and physical potential, and what were perceived as racial pedigrees.
The same combination of prestigious artificial scientific flavor, lending as it does a sense of rigor, carries through to today. Most of today’s framings are less obviously anti-logical than Orwellian anti-truths. I call these contemporary quasi-scientific truisms Gladwellian, after Malcolm Gladwell, who didn’t invent them but began the most recent cascade of fun facts with the popularity of his Outliers book. You might remember something about genius being attributed to the amount of practice devoted to a skill, and the threshold being 10,000 hours. Of course, Gladwell added that most geniuses at a thing were also physically and psychologically suited to pursue those hours and excel more. It’s not a particularly earth-shaking point. But folks were fascinated by the idea they could’ve been as good at hockey as Gordie Howe if they’d just worked at it enough. Too old a reference? Consider the source.
In a review of the book for The New York Times, cognitive and evolutionary psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker wrote, "The reasoning in 'Outliers,' which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle."
Pinker, funny enough, was accused of the same type of preferential fruit selection and post-hoc half-baking by critics of his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argued we live in much less violent times than in the past, and so human progress beyond the merely technological is a real thing. We are making conditions better through the generations. He was criticized not simply for his choice of evidence, but misinterpreting the data behind them. Critics also felt his focus was carelessly ethnocentric. The archaeologist David Wengrow, who with our late great friend David Graeber wrote the, to me, unassailable masterpiece, The Dawn of Everything, said the archaeological reasoning in Pinker’s book read like "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along."
Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, which claimed to prove that diversity didn’t work, refuted that Pinker showed bias, saying he was not a “polemicist,” and that “he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions." Like Fox News: We report, you decide!
A book reviewer in The Guardian said of The Diversity Illusion: “West's arguments are repeatedly undermined by reality. For instance, he points to three London boroughs to prove that diversity undermines education; in fact, London schools have improved so rapidly in the past 10 years – a period of unprecedented immigration – that even children in the capital's poorest boroughs now do better than the average pupil elsewhere in the country. And to say that aside from food, little innovation has arisen from immigration shows, only willful blindness to both cultural and economic reality.”
Gladwellisms have the truthiness of a Colbert Report satirical factoid – The Colbert Report? Steven Colbert’s first talk show? Anyone? – but backed up with research that may or may not be half-assed. Gladwellisms appeal to what everyone from working class thinkers to the petit-bourgeoisie to the owner/operators of capital already kind of believed anyway. Not always something the overtly racist meritocrats wanted everyone to believe, like The Diversity Illusion or the carefully prepared racist pop culture roadkill Charles Murry cooked up in The Bell Curve.
The ones that I’m mostly thinking of appeal to those who believe they value equality, justice, and fairness. People like me.
The Stockholm Syndrome, the idea that hostages come to identify with their kidnappers, was never based on anything but anecdote. I liked it because it explained why people voted against their self-interest so often, or at least against the things I thought were in their best interest. It has not stood the test of time.
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief were already misunderstood by readers of her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, before being made popular by Bob Fosse in his self-aggrandizing self-portrait, All That Jazz. Kübler-Ross later explained they were never meant to be either a universal order of stages, nor to apply to everyone experiencing grief.
I like happiness and misery indices. The misery index is an economic indicator – not a Death Metal band – of wellbeing, put together by economist Arthur Okun. It measures how an average citizen is getting along by comparing employment and inflation rates to GDP by nation. I approve of this method.
The World Happiness Report produces a similar collection of surveys nation by nation. It is put out by a coalition comprising Gallup polling service, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. They also test demographic happiness levels by age group. Every year they come out with rankings.
Both indices support my intuition that socialism is good. For seven years in a row, democratic socialist Finland, recently with its donut economy, has been ranked the happiest nation. If neofascist Hungary ever took first place, I wouldn’t be able to take the index seriously. I would either suspect its methodology, or I would just ignore it.
DKE’s conclusions are made of much more solid stuff than some of the other Gladwellisms I’ve listed. Nevertheless, my feeling is that it will one day be looked on as a foolish endeavor with little validity outside the context of certain structures in our peculiar socio-economic system. Like something akin to phrenology. Anybody remember phrenology? Oh. My. God.
Self-assessment is not objective enough to be quantified. It’s like the chain of evidence in a police procedural drama: once the feelings leave the subject’s mind, converted to air, through the mouth, there has already been one layer of adulteration added to the sample, then the researcher adds another, and so on each time the data moves from its point of origin. If I could prove it scientifically, I would.
In the end, a person’s convictions are their own. Hoping to confirm them objectively is very peculiar to our current cultural incarnation. It’s the stuff of barroom trivia. Science can only do so much. It can provide us with helpful technology. It can explore life and the universe. But it can’t tell what’s right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It can’t to any precise degree measure feelings. We can grope at these slippery things with numbers, but in the end, as the prophet said – remember the prophet? – he said, “All is vanity and grasping the wind.” Can’t really prove that, either though.
If you'd used Wayne Gretzky as your hockey reference ... the youngsters probably still wouldn't get it.
Great post. And I'm a fan of Gordie Howe. I was glued to the TV in 1972 in the USSR, watching the Summit games -- Team Canada vs. USSR -- for which Howe came out of retirement and brought his two sons to the Soviet Union to play with him for Canada.