Karmona Pragmatic Blog

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people who are worst at a task show the most illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average (e.g. “shut up I hack you“ :)

Justin Kruger & David Dunning have tested and verified the following predictions:

• Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own ability and performance 
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others (it takes one to know one ;)
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy (“One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled”)
• If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill (There is still some hope)

Do you have the confidence that this post isn’t about you? 

Think again… (!!!) - “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (Charles Darwin)

Do you think this post is about you?

Might be considered vain but interesting enough, the same research have shown that the top performers tended to underestimate their own performance compared to their peers (see chart below). 

So… if you find this post boring, obscure, stupid, annoying, poorly written or inappropriate than please keep in mind it isn’t something I have committed knowingly.

* The 1st manned landing on Earth’s Moon was the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969 and the last one was Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972
* Current U.S. Vision for Space Exploration calls for a human landing on the Moon no later than 2019

2019-1972=47 (!!!)

Someone wise once gave this as a metaphorical example for a common engineers disorder, he called experience-anxiety-disorder, claiming that NASA stopped sending manned missions to the moon since they now know much more about the complexity and risk with doing this.

During the early seventies, it was a nice, naive working implementation but when NASA engineers started thinking about the next release they have built a five-decades-project-plan simply because they considered all the technological experience they have gained into large complexity buffers.

The Moral Lesson
Keep-it-simple can-do-approach and don’t over-complicate things with the long-tail-little-details when not needed or the project will take 5 decades to finish.

How do you know you are have an experience-anxiety-disorder?
If someone ask you to add a button to change the database schema and this make you feel a mixture of fear, apprehension, heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath and headache.

What to do?
Sit down and relax, drink a cup of water and then add the damn button!

Last Long-Tail-Detail
Well… I don’t want to ruin this lovely moral lesson with the long-tail-little-detail but the real facts behind this 47 years gap were politics and money (as always) and not that NASA engineers got a severe experience-anxiety-disorder.

Google Trends (a.k.a. my experiment – part IV – Almost forgot…)

• Betty Casey
  
• Most Haunted Life
  
• Piercing & Tattoos
  
• Madonna
  
• World War III (…)
  

The term “déjà vu” describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously.

“We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time – of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances – of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remember it!” - Charles Dickens

In recent years, déjà vu has been subjected to serious psychological and neurophysiological research. The most likely explanation of déjà vu is that it is not an act of “precognition” or “prophecy”, but rather an anomaly of memory; it is the impression that an experience is “being recalled” which may result from an overlap between the neurological systems responsible for short-term memory and those responsible for long-term memory.

In other words, “déjà vu” is yet another careless data inconsistency situation due to poor synchronization mechanism and hectic multithreaded race-condition incidents a.k.a. “Dark-Voodoo” bugs (e.g. “déjà vu” ;-)

—

There are many ways in which the deja experience may manifest: deja entendu – already heard; deja eprouve - already experienced; deja fait – already done; deja pense – already thought; deja raconte – already recounted; deja senti – already felt, smelt; deja su - already known (intellectually); deja trouve – already found (met); déjà vécu - already lived; deja voulu – already desired; deja arrive – already happened; deja connu – already known (personal knowing); deja dit - already said/spoken (content of speech); deja goute - already tasted; deja lu – already read; deja parle – already spoken (act of speech); deja pressenti – already sensed; deja rencontre – already met; deja reve - already dreamt; deja visite – already visited and my recent favorite invention: déjà posté – already posted…