Wrote my secrets on a birch bark strip
Today would have been my grandfather's hundredth birthday. I don't tend to think of "About Building" as a ghost poem for him and my grandmother, but I suppose it must be.
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larryhammer linking an article on the potential debunking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, I was reminded of my mother's research in the '70's. It was not a direct forerunner of their study, but it was not totally dissimilar in that she was studying how self-perception interacts with objectively assessed skills, specifically from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. The prevailing assumption had been that when people who believed themselves to be bad at, say, math were shown that they had actually done quite well on a math test, they would accept the new data and do just as well if not better when given the opportunity to re-take the test. Instead, it turned out that in cases where I am bad at math was an essential part of the subject's self-image, they resolved the dissonance by doing worse on the test than they had the first time—failing questions they had originally aced. They couldn't twist reality around to match the inside of their heads, so they sabotaged the inside of their heads to make them match reality. A percentage of subjects did just realize they were better at math than they had believed and did not, effectively, falsify their answers the second time around: there was no dissonance in play. But where there was, it was a whammy.
I was looking for citations when I discovered that my grandfather had actually done some similar work in the '40's, observing the selective recall of completed or unfinished tasks when viewed within a framework of success or failure, i.e., "No sweat, I zipped through that in no time!" vs. "I suck at this! It took forever!"
I am beginning to feel that Tiny Wittgenstein is some kind of family tradition, only expressed, since I am not a psychologist, as a personification rather than a paper.
From
larryhammer linking an article on the potential debunking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, I was reminded of my mother's research in the '70's. It was not a direct forerunner of their study, but it was not totally dissimilar in that she was studying how self-perception interacts with objectively assessed skills, specifically from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. The prevailing assumption had been that when people who believed themselves to be bad at, say, math were shown that they had actually done quite well on a math test, they would accept the new data and do just as well if not better when given the opportunity to re-take the test. Instead, it turned out that in cases where I am bad at math was an essential part of the subject's self-image, they resolved the dissonance by doing worse on the test than they had the first time—failing questions they had originally aced. They couldn't twist reality around to match the inside of their heads, so they sabotaged the inside of their heads to make them match reality. A percentage of subjects did just realize they were better at math than they had believed and did not, effectively, falsify their answers the second time around: there was no dissonance in play. But where there was, it was a whammy.I was looking for citations when I discovered that my grandfather had actually done some similar work in the '40's, observing the selective recall of completed or unfinished tasks when viewed within a framework of success or failure, i.e., "No sweat, I zipped through that in no time!" vs. "I suck at this! It took forever!"
I am beginning to feel that Tiny Wittgenstein is some kind of family tradition, only expressed, since I am not a psychologist, as a personification rather than a paper.
'The Dig' - Do you know of this?
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210127-the-buried-ship-found-on-an-english-estate
Re: 'The Dig' - Do you know of this?
I know of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo: there's a piece of it in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973), which I read for the first time when I was eleven. I didn't know its discovery had been dramatized! Nice cast.