Friday links! Good with the bad edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments
Elitist sumbitch never ate an ice cream cone in his life.

Elitist sumbitch never ate an ice cream cone in his life.

God never closes a door without opening a window. He sublets, so he doesn’t much care about heating bills or whatever, but he paid all the rent up front. You have to take the good with the bad. Whether it’s the spiny exterior of a delicious cactus or the two hours of Gerard Butler you have to sit through before the end of a Gerard Butler movie, nothing worthwhile comes without its price. Today is Friday, a necessary last push before the sweet, sweet weekend, and news is mixed. Won’t you go from toothpaste to orange juice with me?

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is awesome, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 11 Comments

Graphs, graphs graphs! The robot's art

Judge Holden, the rad Satan figure in Cormac McCarthy’s rad hallucinatory western Blood Meridian, observes that “everything that exists without my knowledge exists without my permission.” A palpable satisfaction comes from naming things, particularly when those things are familiar but somehow yet nameless. Hence the beauty of schadenfreude, or the French expression for thinking of a witty comeback after the moment has passed, esprit d’escalier—”the spirit of the stairs.” Such terms are pleasing because they identify things we recognize but which previously blended into the larger field; they quantify experiences out of the miasma of life. I was therefore extremely pleased, yesterday, when I ran across the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the tendency of underskilled individuals to rate their abilities much higher than average, for precisely the same reasons that they are underskilled.

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Study links conservative politics to “low-effort thinking”

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

Scientists in a lab inspect a readout from the Conservatometer

As a modern, intellectually engaged American, there’s nothing I like better than a study that shows something. Granted, some studies show better stuff than others. When studies show that certain organic compounds affect the reaction rate of ATP synthase, for example, I get extremely bored. But when studies show stuff that I kind of knew anyway—like people in sweatpants are less likely to know where their kids are, or coffee is good for you—I perk right up. Luckily for me, the Huffington Post exists. Yesterday they observed their bimonthly tradition of linking to a scientific study that suggests conservatives are dumber than progressives. The study in question is right here, and it’s worth reading to understand the methodology researchers used to correlate increasingly conservative views with “low-effort thinking.”

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