
Further Explorations of Absent Self-Insight Among the Incompetent - DonnyV
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/
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cessationoftime
This is a problem with the medical establishment in the realm of nutrition.
They are not taught nutrition and so they do not recognize nutritional
problems and they are also unaware of their poor performance on doing so. And
so there is a subset of unnecessary chronic disease.

I'd really like to see someone make a home device that can test for
nutritional deficiencies at home. Feed someone something like Soylent, a known
input, and then test the "output". And determine nutritonal deficiencies based
on how the output differs from healthy individuals. This is already done
clinically to an extent, but I think the ability to continuously/cheaply
record a nutritional history would be invaluable for many. Blood tests just
dont cut it. The body likes to keep blood parameters in far too narrow a range
making it hard to deduce intracellular status from extracellular fluids except
in critical situations.

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jared314
> I'd really like to see someone make a home device that can test for
> nutritional deficiencies at home.

Home health monitoring was the end goal of the "Intelligence Toilet" system
made by Toto (Japan). I'm not sure how far they've been able to take it since
2005, but it was suppose to start with urine sugar level monitoring.

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gohrt
Related: [http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7245069/adult-swim-
infome...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7245069/adult-swim-infomercial-
smart-pipe)

'Smart Pipe' is every bad startup in one delightful parody | The Verge

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jqm
I believe trying something is the best way to find ones real abilities (or
lack thereof). Not coincidentally, it is also a way (sometimes) to actually
improve said abilities.

Some people don't try much, and so assume they know a lot about how things
should be done, or what they could easily do if they did have the inclination
to try.

The world seems to be many people talking, few people doing.

Sadly it seems the best talkers and worst doers often take the reigns of
leadership, maintaining control and explaining away errors by more talking
instead of insight. Organizations that succumb to this blight (and there are
so many on so many levels) invariably seem to run into problems before long
and I think this article explains why.

Just my opinion.

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Sven7
And you...talker or doer?

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tjradcliffe
There's something fundamentally wonky about this whole discussion.

The claim is that people who are bad at cognitive task A are also almost
always bad at meta-cognitive task A', which is evaluating their competency at
task A. The argument is by turns tautological (people with bad grammar are
poor at evaluating the quality of their grammar) and empirical (poor
performers who are presented with evidence of their incompetence fail to
adjust their estimates of their competence.)

Here is the study that has not been carried out, though (so far as I know):
test the _same_ people on tasks that they are good at and tasks that they are
not good at. If the effect is universal and explanatory _in an interesting
way_ you'd expect people to behave very differently depending on the task,
because not everyone is good at everything.

I'm a very good poet
([http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html](http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html),
[http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=58](http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=58),
[https://greenteadoodles.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/painting-
th...](https://greenteadoodles.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/painting-the-voyage-
final-version/.))

I write decent prose
([http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html](http://www.siduri.net/songsofalbion/songs_of_albion.html),
[http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-
ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-
ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417673706&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem)).

I can't really paint at all (thankfully no examples of my work in this field
are on line).

And from my own perspective, at least, I'm capable of evaluating all my
capabilities in those areas pretty well. It is implausible that the critical
skills that let me evaluate the quality of my poetry--which evaluation is
based in part on some very positive responses from other poets, as well as
some nice comments from ordinary readers and my own internal judgement--
somehow magically fail when I evaluate the quality of my prose or painting. Or
vice versa.

The Dunning-Kruger argument depends on the claim that critical evaluation
skills are linked to the skill being evaluated, and yet there is an argument
that is at least as strong that critical evaluation of performance is a skill
that is more-or-less orthogonal to others. I knew I kinda sucked at spelling
long before there were universal spell-checkers, because people I trusted told
me I did whenever I failed to carefully, manually, spell-check things. I
didn't have to have spelling skills to make that evaluation. I simply had to
be a mentally competent person with friends and co-workers I trusted, and know
how to use a dictionary.

The experimental data they have seem to be basically OK, but the experimental
setup may radically limit the relevance of those data to the real world. Poor
generalizability has been an ongoing problem for psychological research: very
often effects that are seen in the lab don't have any particular implications
for the world outside the lab, despite our eagerness to tell just-so stories
about them. For example, people who play FPS video games have scores on
aggression measures that are statistically higher than those who don't, in the
immediate aftermath, but show no greater propensity for actual violence in the
real world.

So while I'm not questioning the ability of the instruments they are using to
generate the data they are seeing, I am questioning their interpretation of it
as it applies to interesting real-world situations, given that it would seem
to imply that I'm a mediocre poet and a good painter, and that is simply not
correct, unless the poets who praise my poetry are all figments of my
imagination, and an extremely competent artist who has seen my painting and
said (correctly) it looks like I have no clue what I'm doing is crazy or
lying, which is not very plausible at all.

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jdawg77
Shared on LinkedIn, but, this is particularly concerning to me as a consultant
if nothing else. Given that you're an "expert," how do you help teach self
awareness?

On the flip side, suppose I'm a terrible consultant and so bad, I can't even
recognize my own failure. It's going to be a struggle to learn to accept the
input, even from those who care, that I really suck at consulting. Ergo, it's
a vicious cycle indeed.

Wouldn't one possible outcome of research like this be that only those
dedicated to self improvement will eventually become competent, and all others
are doomed to eventual incompetence in any given field where on-going learning
is needed?

