Don Quixote - "Freedom, Sancho..."

A part of my "wonder times".

Chapter LVIII

"When Don Quixote saw himself in open country, free, and relieved from the attentions of Altisidora, he felt at his ease, and in fresh spirits to take up the pursuit of chivalry once more; and turning to Sancho he said, "Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can fall to the lot of man. I say this, Sancho, because thou hast seen the good cheer, the abundance we have enjoyed in this castle we are leaving; well then, amid those dainty banquets and snow-cooled beverages I felt as though I were undergoing the straits of hunger, because I did not enjoy them with the same freedom as if they had been mine own; for the sense of being under an obligation to return benefits and favours received is a restraint that checks the independence of the spirit. Happy he, to whom heaven has given a piece of bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but heaven itself!"

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst...

...and do your bit.

Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

The Dunning-Kruger effect

A friend of mine just directed my attention to the so-called (in psychology) Dunning-Kruger effect. We can find in Wikipedia the following (LINK):

"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence".

The original paper related to this effect is:

• J. Kruger, D. Dunning, "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 6, 1121-1134, 1999.

A pdf file of the paper can be found HERE

I found many problems to track recent research work on this topic and I find it very interesting...