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Tag Archives: This American Life

Dunning-Kruger and The Donald: torn between two topics

28 Apr

Like many other things in my life, I was made aware of the Dunning-Kruger Effect from listening to NPR. This time, it was my longest running favorite show, This American Life, that clued me in.

Briefly, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. The effect gets its name from the authors of the 199 paper, “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” by Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134

One of the things that Dunning (who was interviewed for the show) said was that the effect had become a ‘meme’ that was often mentioned on twitter. To test this, the show’s producer immediately went online, entered the name of the two authors, and came up with a tweet calling Donald Trump a perfect example of the effect.

Ha! this is gunna be huge!! I can see myself gliding off the rails…

It’s hard to not see Trump as an example of any number of  psychological conditions. In fact, I think that it might be this more than anything that has all of us (even the ones who don’t admit it) fascinated by the Trump spectacle.

And the pool answered,
‘But I loved Narcissus because,
as he lay on my banks and looked down at me,
in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.’

Of course, merely by saying this, we are all sharing the tongue-in-cheek agreement that we know, for a fact, that The Donald is not at all intelligent. The assumption is not just that he is no better than average, but that he is significantly below average. Which might be going a bit too far. A total moron would have lost all the money he ever got from dad, wouldn’t he? I suspect that we’re all just over compensating for Trump’s own excesses in regard to self-opinion.We react to the narcissist by knocking them down – all the way down.

Again, I’m losing control…

The problem is not whether the man is smart or dumb, ignorant or wise. The problem is that we are about to hand the reigns of what is arguably the world’s most powerful country over to an amateur out of frustration that things aren’t going better than they are. Imagine using that same logic in hiring a plumber or electrician for your home. “I’m so sick of all the electrical problems this place is having, I think I’ll hire Brittany Spears to wire my house! She’s rich; she must know what she’s doing.”

While Brittany probably is willing to admit that she doesn’t know anything about electrical work (I’m assuming this is true, but I don’t know), the narcissist finds nothing outside of his ken. See this great article in Vanity Fair where physcologists participate in some armchair sport and analyze Trump’s mind.

Grammar_Dunning_Kruger

From the 1999 paper

Getting back to the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think it’s worth noting that all groups in the data shown here believe that they’ve performed similarly. Dunning seemed to think that this was because the highest quarter was either modest or over estimating of others’ abilities, while the lowest two quarters were simply suffering from the using the same poor analytical skills in assessing themselves as they did in solving text questions.  How much is this just hand-waving to explain why we feel like the children of lake woebegone, all of us: above average?

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The Figure 3 data above shows the Effect following examination of grammar ability. Nearly identical data resulted from similar examinations of logic and … humor? Apparently jokes were rated by commedians (in order to establish factual data on humor?) and then the participants were examined as with the other subjects.

Really though. How can you say that someone is incorrect on their ability to recognize funny. The problem I see with that data is that everyone – absolutely everyone, should have said that they scored 100% on that test.

 

 
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Posted by on April 28, 2016 in Uncategorized

 

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VW in Detroit?

14 Oct

This American Life just solved Volkswagen’s Branding PR debacle free of charge.

I’ve been thinking about VW’s diesel fraud a lot lately. Why? Because I was one of the VW faithful – one of the tribe. I drive a VW Jetta TDI and have felt betrayed by a friend. And every day that I drive my car I wonder if the person behind me at the stoplight is looking at the “TDI” emblem and shaking their head thinking ‘you poor sap.’

My interest has also been sparked by attending some Branding Seminars at our local business center, The Enterprise Center of Johnson County, and following classes on Marketing and Branding on Coursera, specifically ‘Brand Management: Aligning Business, Brand and Behavior, by the London School of Business’ Nader Tavassoli.

For Tavassoli’s class we had an assignment where we were to look at a brand we were interested (typically that of the company you work for, but in my case, VW) and ask people what they think of the brand in one word (apparently a mantra of Brand managers is: Distill, distill, distill). Fortunately for me, I don’t even have to go looking for answers. Every time I open the paper there’s an article like this one on the correction that VW is going to be using in new cars going forward. Every time I listen to the news on the radio, I hear reports like the All Things Considered report I mentioned in my last post.

So, what words are people using today to describe Volkswagen? Fraud. Liar. Arrogant. Mistrust.

What other companies have faced PR debacles like this and survived (or not) in the past?jack

  1. Tylenol – I talked about this one before. The message here being that if you get in front of the problem and make your product even better than before, you can come out on top.
  2. Ford Motor Company – Remember the Pinto? The New Yorker just did a brilliant piece in The Engineer’s Lament.
  3. Nixon – well. There might not be a lot to learn here, but the country did recover once Tricky Dick resigned. Sometimes heads have to roll.
  4. Jack in the Box – This one got used in the This American Life piece – and, I’m not sure if I can really get behind their decision to take the offensive. Let’s just say that there are various solutions to any given problem.
  5. Bridgestone Tires – Tread separation led to as many as 200 deaths and 700 injuries.
  6. GM, Ford, and Chrysler CEOs– We learn that sometimes it’s a bad idea to fly your private corporate jet to Washington DC to ask for $25 Billion in bailout funds. In this case, the shaming was personal and was ‘rectified’ by driving hybrids to all future government meetings.

#6 doesn’t really fit the mold of brand problems, but it was a PR problem for these CEOs. Why? Irony. That’s why. And this is the problem that VW is facing: VW’s brand was built on Trust. When Nixon lost the country’s trust, he had to resign from office. There was no saving his brand. People like to see perpetrators pay for the problems they cause.

#1 – Tylenol. That had irony too. A medicine that kills. There was a good chance that it would be the end of that brand, but instead, they doubled down and said, ‘Not only are we going to make our product safer. We’re going to make all medicines safe.’  What could VW learn from this? Perhaps incorporating software to make the driver aware of their car’s emmissions just as many cars now show instantaneous MPG readings. Perhaps by inventing a product that can improve all diesel engines. Perhaps by bringing in a third party regulator to ensure that all VW standards are upheld across the board.

Then…

Today, while raking leaves from the front yard, I listened to the new This American Life podcast by Ira Glass that brought up the problem of VW’s brand. And, as fast as that, they solved it by going to ad execs and asking for ways to stop the bleeding of trust. 1-2-3.

  1. Invite an outside group to do some ‘All Access’ reporting on the way that VW goes to solve its problem.
  2. Crowdsource the solution – and keep their mouths shut and their ears open (my least favorite idea)
  3. Move their headquarters to Detroit, Michigan, own the problem and make a solid investment in a city that needs it right here in America (my favorite idea – it’s a big one, and costs a hell of a lot – but at least the property itself will be cheap)

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Posted by on October 14, 2015 in Uncategorized

 

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Congratulations Sarah Koenig

19 Dec

logoOn January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared.

So begins the serial podcast – a spinoff from This American Life featuring Sarah Koenig researching, editing and performing long form journalism which she and her staff have spent a year investigating.

Adnan Syed has been serving a life sentence for the murder of his former girlfriend, Hae.

The podcast succeeds in several ways: It is the gripping product of intense investigation and reflection; It questions what it is to be accused and sentenced (without ever fully committing to whether this is sentence is correct or not); and it illustrates how the prosecution of minor offences by the police and fundamental religious values within a family can lead to unpredictable and undesirable ends.

First, the purpose of serial is to present one single story from beginning to end over the course of a full ‘season’. In doing this, much more time is spent on a single question than almost any other form of journalism. Each week focuses on a different element of the story from the history of the case, interviews with the witnesses who were called (and some not called) in the case, an exhaustive exploration of cellphone records, and even one episode devoted entirely to the inconsistencies of the case.

Second, it asks what is it to be accused and convicted of a crime that you did not commit (giving Mr. Syed the benefit of the doubt in this question)? What does it do to a life? How much or how little evidence is needed to convict? What factors (other than the facts of a case) may play into a jury’s decision?

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A note from the victim, written just before the crime.

Mr. Syed speaks about how it hurts to have lost the trust of his friends and community. He explains how he has never known independence in his life after leaving school to go directly to jail. He discusses his experience in jail – how it was or was not as he expected, what he does all day, and how he maintains relationships with those on the outside.

Thirdly, it is plain (to me) that much of the trouble that the different players of this story get into is due to their initial unwillingness to expose relatively minor illicit dealings to the police or to keep parents in the dark with respect to relationships outside of their own cultural group (Mr. Syed is of Pakistani Muslim descent and his family has prohibited him from dating girls outside of this religious community.

And, lastly, on a more personal level, this story brings memories of a case in which I sat on the jury for earlier this year. Was our judgment correct? Were we biased against the defendant? Did we have sufficient information to make the decision we made? It was painful to weigh the lack of ‘hard’ evidence against an abundance of ‘circumstantial’ evidence. Yet we were instructed by the court to consider both types of evidence as equivalent (an instruction that literally wound up settling our decision more than any other single fact).

How would I feel if I was the one on trial? Wouldn’t I be irate if I learned that I had been convicted on the basis of such a simple instruction? Is justice really blind? Was this instruction about evidence reasonable?

All during the trial, it was plain to the jury that it was the incompetence of the defendant’s lawyer that really made the case for the prosecution. Would he have been convicted if he had a better lawyer?

I’ve been mulling over all of these questions – bouncing from the case of Adnan Syed, to the one I served on. For all this, I think Serial has been incredibly successful.

 
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Posted by on December 19, 2014 in Uncategorized

 

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Holy Crap! This is spot-on

21 Jan

As a follow-on to This a recent replay of the Doppelgänger episode of This American Life, Ira had Fred Arminsen on to do his Ira Glass impression. On the radio Fred was good. On this video he’s perfect. The word is that this segment never actually aired on SNL, but lucky for us, we have the interwebs!

(sorry, this video is not available to be embedded, but you can catch it through the link below.)

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2014/01/fred-armisens-impression-of-ira-glass

 
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Posted by on January 21, 2014 in Uncategorized

 

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What makes the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short?

18 Jan

ImageHuman Nature

Tiling a bathroom floor is a good time to catch up on the long list of podcasts clogging up  my switcher queue.

Unfortunately, they all seemed to take a dark turn yesterday.  I felt hit one time after another with tales of what vicious animals we can be. As I listened I was thinking of the Faustian comic my son and I found as an iPad app / book, Howard Numlek, that tells the tale of Howard, a meek, uncertain, jobless man who is taken into the employ of Red Suit, Inc., the front company of Satan himself. Poor Howard doesn’t want to work for the Prince of Darkness, but he’s unemployed, the pay is good and he doesn’t have to sell his soul just to work there. All he has to do is collect on the contracts.

I started to think… ‘Yes, I would probably sell myself into such an evil position pretty quickly given the chance.’

The first podcast was Ira Glass’, This American Life. It’s always been a favorite of mine since I first started listening almost twenty years ago. The most recent episode is about ‘Good Guys,’ and the men who think of themselves as such. There were several acts, but the one I thought was most amusing was trying to get the ‘Good Guy Discount.’ … “Hey, you’re a good guy, I’m a good guy, how about we take a little off this purchase to ease the pain a little?” Amazingly, this kind of approach actually seems to work with some people under some circumstances. But the question is, ‘What kind of guy goes around saying he’s a good guy and looking for a reward?’

The obvious answer is: not a very good guy.Image

Next up, also on This American Life, was the story of an Afgan War veteran and his memoirs that show how effective the US Infantry is at converting a mild mannered man into someone whose greatest hope is that he will have the opportunity to kill someone.

Is this something that his experiences did to him – or is it simply uncovering the deep, dark truth inside of us all?

Finally, Freakonomics with their story “Fear Thy Nature”.  As if I wasn’t already doing that!

This story brought up the 1971 Stanford Prison experiment in which students were separated into two arbitrary groups, one becoming prisoners and the other becoming guards. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but was stopped after six days due to the abuses of power exhibited by the guards.

There is some controversy about whether this experiment went the way it did because that’s the way human nature takes us – or if the study volunteers knew what was happening and made an effort to play to the camera.

While I was listening to this I was reminded of a diversity training video I had seen while employed at a plastics manufacturing plant in Delaware City during college. The video illustrated just how easy it was to invent a stereotype about a group from thin air and make it sting in just fifteen minutes of conditioning.

The most amazing thing about this exercise was that I remember the trainer at our company turning off the video and starting a conversation with the employees only to find that they had picked up on the stereotype and were just as vehement in aggressively applying it as any other brand of prejudice that they had ever felt. They had to be reminded more than once that this was only made up as a lesson.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to find this video from the little I remembered about seeing it twenty years ago. It’s still available as Blue Eyed with Jane Elliot from ABC Training. Although I can’t post it here because it is still used, you can follow the link and watch the entire 30 minute video online – it’s astounding.  For a taste of the lesson, watch some footage of Ms. Elliot putting this lesson in action with her 3rd grade classroom in Iowa.

What does this have to do with the low opinion of humanity’s moral character? Watch the video, see how easy it is to sow division between people. It’s a great lesson about the arbitrary nature of bigotry, but it’s also a sad testament to the willingness of people to learn a new stereotype.

 
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Posted by on January 18, 2014 in Uncategorized

 

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My Small Circle

20 Sep

ImageI was just reading a blog entry someone had posted about Mike Birbiglia’s new movie ‘Sleepwalk with Me’ and I wrote  a quick comment back to say that I had just heard this story told on ‘The Moth’ yesterday, when I suddenly realized how small my circle of interest is sometimes. I’m constantly hearing the same people appear on one show or another mostly because I keep listening to my three favorite NPR shows:

‘This American Life’

‘RadioLab’

‘The Moth’

I’m also interested in, and follow, a lot of the people who wind up appearing on these shows. For instance, I’ve read most of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell’s books because I’ve enjoyed their appearances on ‘This American Life.’ I also have read a lot from Jonah Lehrer from both his appearances on ‘RadioLab’ and his column in the New Yorker (previous to the recent problems he has suffered / brought on himself). 

That’s another one, tack on ‘The New Yorker’ because our household devours that on a weekly basis. And, what do you know, a lot of the same people appear in its pages too.

I think I’ve become one of those people that I don’t like who get all their news and information from a single source and have trouble understanding any other points of view. I do try to balance myself out a bit by also reading ‘The Economist’ which is regularly fiscally conservative. I really need to find a good source of information that’s out of this small bubble though. The only caveat is that if I am going to listen to / read someone’s material, they have to be a good producer of that material (quality of reporting / discussion and quality of resources that they draw upon for their material).

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Also any suggestions for other circles of interesting entertainment that lie outside of the NPR triumvirate I mentioned before would also be fun. I love all those guys and enjoy their company, but sometimes I feel like they’re the one’s that are always talking. When are Ira Glass and Jab Abumrod going to sit down and listen to me for a change? 

 

 

 
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Posted by on September 20, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

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