Dunning-Kruger on the rise

The Washington Post reports on the Dunning-Kruger effect:

During the election and in the months after the presidential inauguration, interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect surged. Google searches for “dunning kruger” peaked in May 2017, according to Google Trends, and has remained high since then. Attention spent on the Dunning-Kruger Effect Wikipedia entry has skyrocketed since late 2015.

I learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect in 2010 from a David Pescovitz post to Boing Boing. D-K helped me understand so much about the perspectives of students with serious writing deficits. In October 2016 I came up with the name Dunning K. Trump.

I don’t know what it means that an article about the Dunning-Kruger effect has an error in subject-verb agreement. Did you catch it in the excerpt?

Related reading
All OCA Dunning-Kruger posts

NYRB covers

From the Los Angeles Times: Aida Ylanan analyzes the covers of 500 New York Review Books Classics: “Cover to Cover: The Colors of NYRB Classics.” 500! I have thirty-one of them, I think.

[One could do worse than be a reader of NYRB Classics.]

Writing and money

“Writing has never been a lucrative career choice, but a recent study by the Authors Guild, a professional organization for book writers, shows that it may not even be a livable one anymore”: from a New York Times article about whether it pays to be a writer.

And here I have to invoke what the poet Alice Notley says about writing: “‘non-careerist’ . . . is not the same as not professional.”

“One of the last places”

Annie Spence, librarian: “It's one of the last places you can go that you don't have to buy or believe in anything to come in. You can just come, and we'll help you, no matter what your question is.” From “The Room of Requirement,” a This American Life episode about libraries, including the Brautigan Library.

The origins of “the” wall

From a Forbes article on the origins of “the” (non-existent) wall:

“Inside Trump’s circle, the power of illegal immigration to manipulate popular sentiment was readily apparent, and his advisers brainstormed methods for keeping their attention-addled boss on message,” writes Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising. “They needed a trick, a mnemonic device. In the summer of 2014, they found one that clicked.”

Joshua Green had good access to Trump insiders, including Sam Nunberg, who worked with Stone. “Roger Stone and I came up with the idea of ‘the Wall,’ and we talked to Steve [Bannon] about it,” according to Nunberg. “It was to make sure he [Trump] talked about immigration.”

The concept of the Wall did not click right away with the candidate. “Initially, Trump seemed indifferent to the idea,” writes Green. “But in January 2015, he tried it out at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a presidential cattle call put on by David Bossie’s group, Citizens United. ‘One of his pledges was, ‘I will build a Wall,’ and the place just went nuts,’ said Nunberg. Warming to the concept, Trump waited a beat and then added a flourish that brought down the house. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘builds like Trump.’”

How remarkable that a cheap gimmick created by amoral, irresponsible advisers for an amoral, irresponsible, unthoughtful, easily manipulated candidate should grow to have such enormous costs, becoming an impediment to the very functioning of government. This kind of stuff belongs in a movie, not in reality.

[Cheap gimmick, but not, strictly speaking, a bright shiny object. A precast concrete wall would be neither bright nor shiny. I suppose that “steel slats” could be bright and shiny.]

No shampoo, no shirt

I was late getting to campus, so my daughter Rachel was giving me a ride. Thanks, kiddo!

Walking to the car, I felt my hair flapping in the wind. A long greasy flap. I had forgotten to shampoo. Oh well — I could get away with it for a day.

Once inside the car, I realized that I had forgotten to put on a shirt. But at least I was wearing a T-shirt, white. Crew neck, fortunately. Oh well — I could get away with that too for a day.

Once outside the car, I realized that I had a stain on the front of the shirt. Egg yolk. Oh well. I stood in a field with Rachel and a bunch of people unknown to me, talking.

[This is the fourteenth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. Not one has gone well. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.]

Kids ’n’ coffee

Fresca’s Penny Cooper adventure made me think of my repurposed Ovaltine advertisement, and that made me think of a Nancy panel that I saved some time ago.


[Nancy, January 7, 1955.]

I love the weirdly grown-up threat “We’re through.” “We’re through, finished, washed up — if you don’t stop dunking!” Though the inside of each cup is white, I think that Nancy and Sluggo must be drinking and dunking in coffee. Who dunks in milk? Not kids who use cups with saucers. Which raises all kinds of questions: Are Nancy and Sluggo in a café? Would a café serve coffee and donuts to kids? Is the Ritz household the setting for this strip? Did Aunt Fritzi brew the coffee? Does she know that her niece is drinking it? Is Nancy using the good china? Does Aunt Fritzi dunk? Does Sluggo’s dunking remind Nancy of her aunt?

I’ve revised this panel in the interest of coffee.


[Nancy revised, January 7, 1955.]

*

September 27, 2021: When this strip returned today, I realized that the splash needed coloring in. Again, in the interest of coffee.

[Nancy revised again, January 7, 1955.]

Related reading
All OCA coffee and Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, is pretty, pretty easy, save for one fifteen-letter answer that still baffles me. I got it, but what’s it mean?

The puzzle begins with what looks to me like a giveaway: 1-Across, eight letters, “What ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was first scored for.” Two clues I especially liked: 3-Down, six letters, “Right-spun yarn term.” And 37-Down, eight letters, “Menu of a sort.” 3-Down, which might be a giveaway for someone else, was for me a matter of getting the crosses. 37-Down I liked for its subtle misdirection. (When I see menu in a crossword I think only of food and computers.)

The clue for the answer that baffles me: 36-Across, fifteen letters, “Start of a updated auric adage.” What?

Oh, wait — I just tried typing out the answer, and now I see it.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

[“A updated”: not a typo, or at least not my typo. My typo was “Satuday” in the post title, now corrected.]

“So now we have everything so beautifully handled”

I transcribed a chunk from the archived broadcast and punctuated to try to match the cadences of speech. The incoherence speaks for itself, but I find the frantic disjunction even more frightening in pixels.

“Now the steel is actually more expensive than the concrete, but I think we’re probably talking about steel because I really feel the other side feels better about it, and I can understand what they’re saying. It is more expensive. We mentioned the price, that we want 5.6 billion dollars, very strongly. Because numbers are thrown around, 1.6, 2.1, 2.5. This is national security we’re talking about. We’re not talking about games; we’re talking about national security. This should have been done by all the presidents that preceded me, and they all know it. Some of them have told me we should have done it. So we’re not playing games; we have to do it. And just remember human traffickers, remember drugs. The drugs are pouring into this country. They don’t go through the ports of entry. When they do, they sometimes get caught. When we finish, and the Democrats do want this, they want ports of entry strengthened, and I wanna do that, too, in fact, we have it down, it’s about 400 million dollars, and we can have the best equipment in the world. Now what they’ll do, if we have the protection, and we have strong ports of entry, with this incredible drug-finding equipment, I dunno what they’re gonna do, because they’re not comin’ in through past the steel gates or the steel walls or the concrete walls, depending on what’s happening, because we are meeting this weekend. We have a group, I’ve set up a group; they are going to tell us who their group of experts, and probably people in the Senate, and Congressmen, and -women, are gonna come, and we have three. I said, ‘Give us three.’ Then I said ‘You know what? Send over nine or six or three or two, it doesn't matter, send over whoever you want,’ but it's common sense. So now when they make that turn, they make it, and now all of a sudden they can’t go any further, and they have to go back, and that’s gonna stop the caravans for two reasons. Number one, they’re not gonna be able to get through, but when they realize they can’t get through, what’s gonna happen? They’re not gonna form, and they’re not gonna try and come up. And they can apply for asylum, and they can, most importantly, they can apply for citizenship because the companies that I told you that created these great job numbers — they’re incredible job numbers, beyond anybody’s expectations, I don’t think there was one Wall Street genius, of which I know many of them, but they’re not geniuses, there’s not one that predicted anywhere close to these job numbers. I thought they were gonna be good, but there wasn’t one that I saw. So now we have everything so beautifully handled.”

As my mom says, “I think there’s something wrong with him.”

Mid-century cigarette machine

[Walter Baldwin, Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott, Robert Hutton. From The Racket (dir. John Cromwell, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

I wondered early on if a better glimpse of that cigarette machine might be in the offing. And there was. There are many ways for a movie to hold my interest. I wondered too if suspected perps were allowed to purchase cigarettes in the police station.

It’s remarkable how recognizable those cigarette packs are at such distances of space and time, at least the first seven: Chesterfield, Chesterfield, Lucky Strike, Camel, Old Gold, Camel, Philip Morris. I’d say “iconic,” but I avoid that overused word.


[Who is the eighth who stands always beside you?]

In addition to its one cigarette machine, The Racket has one Mongol pencil and one great insult, crime boss Nick Scanlon (Robert Ryan) to Irene Hayes (Lizabeth Scott): “Why you cheap little clip-joint canary!” And two pocket notebooks.

Also from this film
One Mongol pencil : Two pocket notebooks