Ranting to /dev/null

Too dumb to know you're dumb

There's an interesting article on the APA site I got from deep in a Slashdot discussion whose basic thesis is that the less competent you are, the less likely you are to realize that you're incompetent.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Not only do the incompetent lack the skills to tell whether or not they're doing something right, but as they also necessarily lack the skills to recognize competence in others, they are quite likely to grossly overestimate their own competence. Hence the depressingly common "I'm too good for that job" mentality in losers everywhere.

To make a quick reference to a discussion over on Josiah's blog a few days ago, like it or not, there is a mathematically necessary reason that we have people that score in the lowest two quartiles of any given test: it's curved. Corrolate that with things like the 80/20 rule in economics and Clay Shirky's application of power laws to blog traffic, and the temptation of ditching the bell-curve as a useful model for thinking about society grows pretty strong. All this by way of saying that most of the people in this country aren't really capable of holding down a nice, white-collar job with decent benefits, because it would require a level of discipline and competence that most people just don't have. So bring on the Wal-Mart. We need more low-income jobs.