In my brother’s most recent post he takes stock of what it means to be ‘three dog years’ into retirement. This inspired me to think about my own six weeks in (since I don’t think in dog years). I’ve tried to sum it up in the graphic below.
– In which Dorn checks on his progress.
It has now been 157 days, or three dog years, since I retired, so I thought I’d take stock. How has my life been upended? How has it stabilized? How is my bucket list doing?
Food. I have always loved to cook, especially to bake, and especially to bake bread. One time during my working days I decided I was going to master the perfect rustic loaf: crusty and crunchy outside, chewy and feisty on the inside. I had gotten pretty close too, but then I got busy, and the skills were eventually lost. I could still bake bread, just not the bread.
But since I retired, I’ve started my quest up again. This time, I was armed with a luscious stinky sourdough starter and tips from my good friend S.C— T— (also an adept of the Doughy Arts), and a great recipe for bread in a Dutch Oven. Equipped as I was with ingredients, tools, arcane know-how, and most of all time, I quickly started making progress.
Then one day I stepped on the bathroom scale and realized that I was paying a heavy (get it?) price for my knowledge, that I was not willing to pay. Since then I have scaled back, and am content to make incremental progress toward bread perfection, at a rate governed approximately by the rate at which my friends and neighbors are willing to take the loaves off my hands. Stay tuned!
Clothing. Once freed from the tyranny of “dress codes” and “business casual”, I’ve been able to discharge a Debt of Honor to my sister Tara.
When Tara’s daughters were a bit younger, they started to experiment with hair dye. These were hues completely outside of the crayon box that mother nature provided her children: neon pinks, blues, purples, greens. At that time, I told my sister that she should dye her hair like that too, and to sweeten the deal, I said that if she would, then I would. But Tara called my bluff and took the neon plunge! And so did my other sister Lona! And my other sister Innes!
I was still working then, and I confess that I was worried how a not-of-this-earth hair statement might be viewed at my workplace. They weren’t prudes there, but there were certain unspoken lines that it took more courage than I had to cross. But now I’m retired and can do as I please, so I got my hair dyed an electric cyan-blue that would do Milhouse’s dad Kirk proud.
Shelter. Kathleen and I have been looking into perhaps a small house trailer, inspired by a dream to travel the world in a way that allows us to bring our dog Archie everywhere, and partly spurred on by Lona’s recent post-retirement purchase of a cool retro-looking Scamp trailer. We’ve only made a little progress on our own mobile home dreams, but we almost closed a deal on a new (to us) pickup truck that I think could pull a nice Teardrop, if we get one. Baby steps!
Wherewithal. The government was shut down right before I retired, so some of the tasks for which I was responsible had to go un-transitioned. I told them at work that if they arranged a contract, I would help with some transitioning later on. They did, and I’ve done just a little bit. It gives me an excuse to see some old friends, and it doesn’t seem like it will have too great an impact on my time (or my income).
But one wrinkle I had forgotten about was that as part of this contract, I will need a Common Access Card (CAC), which is a government-issued photo ID. If I had planned it better, I might have gotten this card before I honored my hair-promise to my sister. We’ll see how that goes.
Thanks!
-dorn
7/8/19
I know exactly when I learned to draw. It was April 1959 and I was six and a quarter. I had just drawn a man in a hat that I was rather proud of and I showed it to my Dad. He suggested that I really look at how a hat set on a man’s head. I had drawn it fully on top of the head, kind of balancing up there and he drew an example sketch to show how it really came part of the way down the head! (Remember in 1959 it was before JFK convinced men that they did not need to wear hats!)
I was able to copy his lesson pretty well. Wow! What a concept! To draw something all you really had to do was really **look** at it. I’ve had many art classes as an adult that said basically the same thing. The book I was looking at by Kevin Macpherson to try to get back into landscape painting says it too: “Paint what you see, not what you know”.
So when I started the painting below on location in Piscataway Park, I was trying to really look at the water since that seemed challenging. Kevin also says, “All paintings are lessons for the next.”
– In which Dorn demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect while retelling an archetypal myth.
I really like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Not the real Dunning-Kruger effect, but the one that’s most portrayed in popular culture. This interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect describes the path of learning of a typical “know-nothing”, who, shortly on being introduced to a field of knowledge, assumes he has become an expert, and is insufferable (and wrong) until he learns enough to realize how little he actually knows.
The real Dunning-Kruger effect is reported in the experiments they published in their 1999 paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, J. Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121.
I believe that the experiments, for which Justin Kruger and David Dunning were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology in 2000, actually point to a slightly different interpretation. This graph shows one of the results of one of their experiments, plotting perceived and measured skill at a specific task.
This graph says to me that most people in this study thought they knew about as much as the average person person participating in that study, or maybe a bit more (or maybe, since the measure in question is about skill relative to a group, that most people thought that other people in the field knew as much as they did, or almost.). As one becomes more knowledgeable in the field, one’s self assessment becomes more accurate and more positive, and strays further from the population median.
The interpretation seems supported by the experiments, and by common experience. But it just doesn’t tell as good a story as the first interpretation, and I’m convinced that that is why the first Dunning-Kruger curve predominates the online popular discussion.
Why is the first story better?
Joseph Campbell knew the answer, and he explained it to Bill Moyers, and the rest of us, in a 1988 PBS documentary series, The Power of Myth. The conversations between the two seem dated now–back then, the cultural touchstones were the Star Wars and Rambo movies, LSD and peyote were still controversial drugs, and the Vietnam War and even the assassination of Kennedy were still in the common living memory. But as Joseph Campbell would be the first to point out, the myths of the human condition transcend differences of region and era.
The TV series’s companion book, also called The Power of Myth, is still interesting reading today for the revelation (or reminder, depending on your age) of what contemporary views on myth, religion, and their role in American culture were thirty years ago, long before 9/11 placed culture and religion on a war footing that we’re still struggling with.
Here’s a brief snippet.
I believe the first interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect better resonates with a myth that has been told countless times over the centuries in a thousand variations. I’ll retell the myth in the variation that I learned–the federal employee version:
A career federal employee has worked hard for years to master his or her field, and is now a well-respected expert. Then one day an obnoxious political appointee or elected official comes in, and thinks he knows best what the agency should be doing and how it should do it. But he doesn’t really know, and he messes it all up. The myth has two alternate endings:
(a) the career professional comes in and saves the day;
or the more common ending,
(b) everything is ruined, and the career professional has the bitter satisfaction of knowing what evil might have been averted, and what good accomplished, if only someone had listened to him or her.
The myth doesn’t necessarily require that the jackass political appointee get his public comeuppance, or ever see how wrong he was. It’s sufficient that the career professional, the real hero of the myth, sees it. The wise man knows the fool is a fool, even if the fool doesn’t. I call this story the Myth of Comeuppance.
Note 1. Please note that I am speaking here of universal archetypes, not my own experience, at least not recently. I would have to go back many years and several jobs to find a time when this particular myth resonated personally with me.
Note 2. I wanted to call my myth “The jackass effect”, but that’s taken: Dr Lawrence Rubin describes the jackass effect in the Psychology Today blog as the increase in self-destructive or just plain stupid behavior for thrills or laughs brought on by the Jackass movies.
Thanks!
Dorn
7/5/19
– In which Dorn explains, uh, Dorn explaining.
There’s a term in popular use now that I have mixed feelings about, “mansplaining”. I realized how much I didn’t like it during a recent conversation with my learned friend Kelly Samek. The conversation was about a website called AreMenTalkingTooMuch.com, which contains an online version of a sort of chess timer that you can use at a boring meeting if you want, as the website says, to:
Few people will try this online experiment, I suspect, without having a good guess of what the answer will be, which is kind of the point. Like the term “mansplaining”, the point is that men overexplain things to women and under-listen to explanations from women, regardless of topic or the relative expertise of the men and women involved.
During the conversation with Kelly I felt like I needed to defend myself against being guilty of practicing mansplaining, even though she didn’t accuse me of it, and I agree that men in general (including me) do indeed do it.
I immediately felt guilty about feeling defensive about mansplaining, because hey, with all the societal advantages that being a guy brings, I should be able to suck up a little harmless ribbing. And that’s not just my feeling–it’s the zeitgeist. I tried a search on gender based stereotypes, and my first hit (MDHealth.com) informed me that stereotyping male attributes (sex-obsessed, lazy at home, presidential) is “fun”. The search didn’t yield any hits that were outraged by the male stereotyping, just as I wouldn’t expect to find any sites outraged by lawyer jokes.
Why should I feel bad about the word “to mansplain”? Well, for one thing, it’s a derogatory stereotype, which we liberals are supposed to hate (unlike all those conservatives!). (That’s irony, you got that, right?) I remember being shocked the first time I heard someone use the verb “to jew”. I’m not shocked by, and in fact have used myself, “to gyp” and “to welch”, but now I know their origins, I know intellectually what’s wrong with them.
For another thing, the word allows someone who doesn’t know anything about me to draw a negative conclusion about me based solely on my gender. The fact that it’s a true conclusion just makes it worse.
I don’t mind being characterized accurately even when it’s unflattering (he said self-importantly, if not very self-awarely), but I’d rather people use what they know about me to describe me, and not just a stereotype. I have a word that I think better captures what I used to do at work, and what I still do now, and I would appreciate it if everyone added it to their lexicon:
“Dornsplaining”. OK?
thanks!
-Dorn
7/3/19
