You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s a guy flooded out from his home, where he holds forth claiming climate change isn’t real, and if it is, isn’t a problem.
Will he accept federal aid to fix his home?
Annals of Global Heating: Karma, sort of. Pollute around, deny problems, and find out
April 14, 2023
1 Comment | 
Climate change, climate_change, Dunning Kruger Effect, Global warming, Green Politics, Politics | Tagged: Climate change, Disasters, Dunning Kruger Effect, Floods, Ft Lauderdale, Global Heating, Karma, Politics | 
Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Time for a nice, cold glass of Dunning-Kruger
August 16, 2021
“When you know more than the doctors who’ve spent their entire careers studying infectious diseases, it’s time for a Dunning-Kruger.”
I wish there were a requirement for inventors of internet memes to sign their work. Who gets credit for this whisky advertising mashup?
Now there’s a video ad, from Dr. Rohin Francis.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Nish Gandhi, DO @supreme_doc.
More:
7 Comments | 121 Merit Badge Club, COVID-19, Dunning Kruger Effect, Dunning-Kruger Effect, Humor, medicine, Politics | Tagged: Dunning-Kruger Effect, Humor, medicine, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Dunning Kruger becomes melody, in the “Incompetence Opera”
February 15, 2019This should be worthy of watching, and of future commentary
Bookmark this video. Sadly, you’ll have much use for it over the next two years.
Tip of the old scrub brush to The Weekly Sift.
More:
- Chief page on Dunning Kruger effect at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
- Darwin described Dunning Kruger effect
- Will Rogers and Kin Hubbard described the Dunning Kruger effect
- Isaac Asimov’s famous statement on his observation of the Dunning Kruger effect
- Jon Wilkins’ cartoon on Dunning Kruger effect
- Bertrand Russell on the Dunning Kruger effect
- Daniel Boorstin’s longer explanation of Dunning Kruger effect
2 Comments | Dunning Kruger Effect, Dunning-Kruger Effect, History, Management, Science | Tagged: Dunning-Kruger Effect, History, Management, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Texas Gov. Abbott sides with cancer, brags about it
October 23, 2015I get e-mail from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and all too often it leaves me shaking my head in disgust.
This one came today. I suppose one needs to understand that the e-mail is intended to mislead the recipients about what Gov. Abbott is doing.
In the War on Cancer, Abbott has sided with cancer. As Attorney General in the later stages of the wilting administration of the beleaguered Rick Perry, Abbott refused to investigate a Texas Constitutionally-established, billion-dollar fund to support cancer research whose administration then-Gov. Perry had turned over to old political friends.
Abbott should have recused himself from any investigation by his office, because under the laws setting up the research fund, he was on the board. Any investigation would need to answer the question about what Abbott had done to be sure the funds were spent as the law intended.
Conflicts of interest don’t bother Greg Abbott, though, so long as the conflicts work in favor of his friends, and political donors.
Fortunately for Texas, there is another, separate office to investigate public wrongdoing in state agencies, the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office. That office indicted one of the cancer agency’s officials (he was convicted of misappropriating $11 million in public funds), and promised to indict more.
This so angered Perry he stepped all over the Texas Constitution to bring down the Travis County DA — and that earned Perry his own indictment after an investigation by a GOP-led task force. Oh, yeah, there were other shenanigans by Perry that he might have wanted to cover up; but the cancer research abuse already sent one Perry buddy to jail.
You get the idea. Cancer research is political in Texas, and probably not all that serious a concern to GOP elected officials. Cancer is something poor people get. Republicans have health insurance.
For years, Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas and the rest of the nation offered free cancer screenings and checkups to women who otherwise could not get them for lack of money. These services have nothing to do with abortion, but a lot to do with obstetrical and gynecological care poor women cannot get otherwise.
Well, now Greg Abbott has ordered funding for those health care services to stop.
Read Abbott’s fund-raising letter — yes, he wants me (and you) to donate to his unholy campaign against women’s health care — and pay particular attention to how he avoids any mention of what kinds of services this funding cut-off will kill. He wants you to think he’s fighting abortion.
Which might be oddly and rarely true, if his denial of cancer screenings enables cancer to kill a woman who might have later gotten an abortion, or destroy her ability to conceive at all.
See the letter, sent with the subject, “Another win against Planned Parenthood”:
___________________________________
Friend,
_______________________________________
So there you have it. Greg Abbott wants you to send him money, because he’s stopped poor women in Texas from getting cancer screenings.
Because, abortion, liberty, guns, and probably, illegal immigrants.
And, because he can get away with it.
How stupid must a Texas politician be to think promoting cancer will help any of those problems? How conniving must one be to try to hoodwink Texans into sending him money, neglecting to mention it’s money to support cutting medical care to women who need it?
How stupid must Texas voters be, if they don’t see through this corrupt ruse?
More:
- Gossip over at Juanita Jean’s beauty parlor gives a perspective on this entire fight that you should have (yes, I said “gossip,” though you and I know that Pulitzer-worthy reporting is what it really is)
- Norwegians aren’t fooled, Juanita Jean says
- Timeline of the Perry/Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) and veto stuff that got him indicted, from KUT-FM at the University of Texas
- Houston Chronicle editorial says it’s all politics, doesn’t help any women, nor babies
8 Comments | Accuracy, cancer, Civil Rights, Dunning Kruger Effect, Health care, Politics, Rampant stupidity | Tagged: Abortion, cancer, Civil Rights, Dunning Kruger, Health care, Politics, Rampant stupidity | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
September 23, 1858: DON’T wash your hands!
September 23, 2015
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis
This is one of the classic stories of public health, an issue that most U.S. history and world history texts tend to ignore, to the detriment of the students and the classroom outcomes.
This is the story as retold by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky in The Experts Speak:
In the 1850s a Hungarian doctor and professor of obstetrics named Ignaz Semmelweis [pictured at left] ordered his interns at the Viennese Lying-in Hospital to wash their hands after performing autopsies and before examining new mothers. The death rate plummeted from 22 out of 200 to 2 out of 200, prompting the following reception from one of Europe’s most respected medical practitioners:
“It may be that it [Semmelweis’ procedure] does contain a few good principles, but its scrupulous application has presented such difficulties that it would be necessary, in Paris for instance, to place in quarantine the personnel of a hospital during the great part of a year, and that, moreover, to obtain results that remain entirely problematical.”
– Dr. Charles Dubois (Parisian obstetrician), memo to the French Academy
September 23, 1858Semmelweiss’ superiors shared Dubois’ opinion; when the Hungarian physician insisted on defending his theories, they forced him to resign his post on the faculty.
Gotta wonder what Dr. Dubois would make of the suits and sanitation procedures required today for health professionals who treat Ebola victims.
More:
- Stephen J. Dubner at the Freakonomics blog pointed to a video, to an essay by Semmelweis, and to a column he and Steven D. Levitt had done earlier on handwashing; Maybe things aren’t as good as we had hoped
- “Why is handwashing important?” press release from the Centers for Disease Control, March 6, 2000
- “In 1850, Ignaz Semmelweis saved lives with three words: wash your hands,” Dr. Howard Markel, PBS Newshour, May 15, 2015
- Semmelweis’s biography at the Semmelweis Society International;
Semmelweis Reflex: The Semmelweis reflex or “Semmelweis effect” is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.
Yes, this is mostly an encore post. Fighting ignorance requires patience.
Leave a Comment » | Dunning Kruger Effect, Famous quotes, Health care, History, medicine, Research, Science | Tagged: Dunning-Kruger Effect, Famous quotes, hand washing, History, Ignaz Semmelweis, medicine, Research, Science, Semmelweis Reflex | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Quote of the moment: Trouble? It comes from “what we know that ain’t so.”
October 15, 2011
Kin Hubbard and Will Rogers, image from Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
It was a warning from a prophet of the past, and it applies to almost every controversy you can think of in 2011:
It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.
The only problem is, to whom do we attribute it? Was it Will Rogers who said, or Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard, or Artemus Ward?
Virtue may be its own reward, but ignorance costs everybody, especially when it is elected or promoted to power.
More:
- Turns out this pathological effect is not uncommon, and the syndrome has a name, the Dunning Kruger Effect; read more on it, here
11 Comments | Dunning Kruger Effect, Dunning-Kruger Effect, Famous quotes, History, Libraries, Newspapers, Politics, Quotes | Tagged: Artemus Ward, Dunning-Kruger Effect, Famous quotes, History, ignorance, Kin Hubbard, Lilly Library, Newspapers, Politics, Quotes, Will Rogers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Quote of the moment: T. H. Huxley
June 29, 2008June 29, 1895: T.H. Huxley DiesThomas Henry Huxley, a British biologist and firm believer in evolution, dies at age 70. The greatest defender of Darwinism in Britain, he once said,
“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
2 Comments | Dunning Kruger Effect, Famous quotes, History, Quotes, Religion, Science | Tagged: Dunning-Kruger Effect, Quotes, Religion, Science, T. H. Huxley | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 