Lake Wobegon Writ Large

Office Space – Special Edition with Flair (Widescreen Edition)

Damn Interesting (which ought to be named “DamnED Interesting”—*heh*) has an, uhm, interesting post, Unskilled and Unaware of It.

“Interesting” is an extreme understatement. Quite apart from the appropriate graphic citation of Milton Waddoms (the Office Space “Swingline guy”) meme, the post serves as a reminder of the dangers of the Lake Wobegon philosophy that “all the children are above average”.

Read the post. It’s a tad longer than many, and it’s info-dense, but it’s well worth your time, IMO. It places much of what you’ll find me ranting about here at twc in context… and—surprise! surprise!—you can decide for yourself how that post relates to my posts here. *heh*

Brief précis (if I may be repetitively redundant)? OK: Most incompetent people think they are not. Not only that, incompetent people are incompetent to assess either their incompetence or the competence of others.

BTW, that’s why, if someone is willing to do their own homework and make a reasoned argument with something I say here at twc, I’m willing to argue with them. I have had a few idiots who’ve attempted to make fake arguments (even one who has attempted to make fake arguments from faking doing his own homework on a topic! What a loon!) from lies, out-of-context quotes (which is just another way to lie), logical fallacies and stubborn assertions contrary to fact.

If they are unwilling (or unable) to learn better, those kinds of folks find their way pretty quickly to my spam filters. Of course, they have viewed that as unfair. Yeh, well, I don’t have the time or inclination to suffer fools, gladly or not.

But anyone who can really teach me something I don’t know by making a decent argument against a position I take is welcome. There’ve been a few of those. I’ve always known I was only middlin’ in the “smarts” arena, and have stood in awe of some folks whose scope of knowledge and ability to reason far exceed my own (yeh, starting with my grandparents, some uncles, a couple of sibs and often my wife and children, let alone folks like Jerry Pournelle, from whose site I got the link to the post referenced above. :-))

One thing we need to combat the tendency of incompetent people to overestimate their own abilities is something like I was blessed with in college: juries. While I discount the value of most of my undergrad degree courses/experience, regular (frequent) assessments by music profs other than my own advisor, complete with detailed and sometimes brutal critiques, was invaluable in teaching me to accept valid criticism.

And also invaluable in helping me set standards for the validity of criticism, of course. Ya want those standards? OK.

1.) Is the critique from someone with genuine credibility? That is, do they excel, not merely exhibit competence but EXCEL, in the area of the critique?
2.) Is the criticism honest? Does the critic have an agenda apart from honest evaluation of my performance? Is it verifiable via other critics with records of equally excellent performance in the field?
3.) Does it stand the tests of reason?

Of course, being able to recognize the characteristics above takes both practice and exposure to the real thing in real life experiences. Unfortunately, in our “Lake Wobegon mentality” public schools, kids don’t get that sort of frank, caring evaluation as often as might be good for them, and “No Child Gets Ahead” is a pretty good way to assure they will continue to be told they are more competent than they are.

Of course, incompetent administrators (which in my experience comprises roughly 99% of “prisons for kids” administrators), remote control educrats and faddish schools of education conspire to prevent even those teachers who are NOT incompetent from really teaching the children well, which must involve a serious component of valid assessment and critique.

And so we get incompetence flourishing at every level of society. “Musicians” who have no shame recording crap for people who are incompetent to realize they are buying and listening to crap because, well, they are incompetent to even know their “music” is off-key, has sloppy rhythms, harmonies that are jejune, lyrics that are even worse, etc. We have masses of sheeple who are so trained to ding the bell every time they hear a laugh track that they don’t even know that sitcom they are watching is not even a low form of comedy but simply unwitting tragedy. And a society that will swallow the worst abuses of its political masters
because, well, what other choice is there when the political elite say, for example, “Move over. Make room for Juan. Sure, he’s been committing felonies for 10 years, but we’ll just pass a law that says his felonious use of fake (or YOUR) SSNs is forgiven. Heck, we’ll even only ask—gently, so as not to hurt his tender sensibilities—poor Juan to choose to pay three of the past five years he’s screwed us on his taxes. You can’t get a deal like that, now can you?”  (Of course you and I can’t. We’re not outlaws. You know, the class for which politicians have a natural affinity and sympathy.)

*Feh*

BTW, this site has the coolest “Initech” stuff, indluding this: