Pie Slice Size may Vary
Knowledge. The Red part just keeps growing, d’oh!
See also Dunning-Kruger Effect. And Dark Energy.
#Unknownunknowns #SundaySermon
Pie Slice Size may Vary
Published
Pie Slice Size may Vary
Knowledge. The Red part just keeps growing, d’oh!
See also Dunning-Kruger Effect. And Dark Energy.
#Unknownunknowns #SundaySermon
Heh. That’s what I’ve always said about education. It’s not so much that it increases the Green Slice, but it sure as hell increases the Blue Slice.
Unknown unknowns
That’s why idiots are always so sure. They don’t know the size of the red part.
Thomas Mueller I dunno. The more I learn, the stupider I feel … heh heh.. The idiots don’t think the Red Slice exists at all.
Red slice = bliss
That’s why teenagers “know” everything!
Sandy B should see this.
And as a friend-of-a-friend says, when you graduate high school you know everything. By the time you get your undergrad you realize you don’t know everything. When you get your masters’ you realize you don’t know anything, and when you get your PhD you realize nobody else does either.
Oh, yes, I didn’t know it’s called Dunning Kruger effect. Part of my red slice until now. 😉
Thomas Mueller The D-K Effect may have a counterpart for the wise among us. Consider this (true) story.
Lyndon B Johnson, the 36th president of the USA, was no dummy. He was the greatest politician of his age: he lived, ate and breathed politics. He came to power after the assassination of John F Kennedy.
LBJ, who had been in the House of Representatives, then Senate Democratic Leader. He was the most effective congressional leader in American history. Nobody else even comes close. He could play the Congress like Rostropovich playing the cello. He was a force of nature.
John F Kennedy was a young man who liked to play dangerous games. Often he lost those games, as at the Bay of Pigs. And he was treacherous. Well, JFK was murdered and LBJ had to take over. LBJ picked up exactly where Kennedy left off, even kept Kennedy’s cabinet and advisors, even Robert Kennedy, whom LBJ despised.
But confronted with the situation in Vietnam, LBJ was perplexed. Eisenhower had looked at the situation, sent in some advisors, who told him there was no winning that war, comparing it to the Romans in Gaul and Germania: if you couldn’t stay and occupy for four centuries, no point in going there at all.
But Kennedy had started pushing back against the communists. Johnson couldn’t figure it out. It looked stupid enough on paper, a lobster trap, easy to get in – hard to get out –
All that to make one point: LBJ saw a pile of shit in the barn and figured there had to be a pony in there somewhere. Well there wasn’t. All of Kennedy’s advisors kept that war on track under the Johnson administration: they were so goddamn smart. But when the nation turned against the war, the advisors left, leaving Johnson alone with the mess he’d allowed to be made of Vietnam – a war he hadn’t started, a war which ruined his reputation.
I call it the LBJ Effect. Anyone, no matter how experienced, how smart, however well-advised, can be trapped. LBJ second-guessed the Vietnam War because he didn’t think he was as smart as Kennedy and those advisors.
Dan Weese: I feel like the D-K effect can also be viewed as a systemic filter. For every person, or group of people, no matter how smart, there is a task sufficiently complex that it exceeds the person/people’s ability to correctly assess its complexity.
John Bump I’m a consultant. I don’t think that’s true. The solution to every task lies in the correct definition of that task. If the definition is lousy, the solution will be lousy.
Dan Weese It is very demanding work to get people to describe what they actually need, and not what they think they want.
Lars Fosdal I have my own approaches to this problem of definitions. Management talks in exceptions, users talk in terms of rules. So I go prowling through the cubicle farm, searching for the person who handles the exceptions. It’s almost always a woman. Her phone is ringing off the hook, people are lined up at her cubicle, they don’t dare promote this woman or the whole place will collapse in shit and ruination.
I take her out to dinner with her husband. You would be amazed what a good steak and a bottle of bordeaux can accomplish. I build the solution around her – and her boss, the guy who approves the exceptions.
If the task seems complex, the complexity usually arises from issues of policy and the application of experienced judgment.
Never ask anyone what they need. Ask them where the pain is, where the money and time and effort is being wasted, where experience is being ignored, where customers are unhappy, where communications failures arise, where people are working at cross-purposes. Honour your users. Believe in the people who must do the task, it’s not all that tough. It all comes down to good data and good people – more people than data.
You missed a yellow slice: Stuff I don’t know, but, really, I just don’t need to know it. That one grows a lot as you get older.
Dan Weese That advise should be printed and framed! Awesome and spot on!
Jan Moren So “Stuff I chose to ignore” 🙂
“Shit you don’t give a fuck about” in the pie slice language 🙂