Category: Uncategorized

Drawing Lesson Circa 1959

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.”

Accokeek Creek

Joseph Campbell and the Myth of Comeuppance

– 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.

MOYERS: What did you think of the outpouring over John Lennon’s death? Was he a hero? CAMPBELL: Oh, he definitely was a hero. MOYERS: Explain that in the mythological sense. CAMPBELL: In the mythological sense, he was an innovator. The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let’s call it, for meditation and Oriental music. Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it’s about. We are hearing more and more of it, and it’s being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That’s what the Beatles started. MOYERS: Sometimes it seems to me that we ought to feel pity for the hero instead of admiration. So many of them have sacrificed their own needs for others. CAMPBELL: They all have. MOYERS: And very often what they accomplish is shattered by the inability of the followers to see. CAMPBELL: Yes, you come out of the forest with gold and it turns to ashes. That’s a well-known fairy-tale motif. Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth (p. 163). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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

Mansplain-spotting

– 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:

Image the question, "who's talking?", and two timer buttons, labeled "a dude" and "not a dude"

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

Nightmare on 210

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl


My brother’s recent post on Impossible Maps (see it at https://thirdagethoughts.com/impossible-maps/)  inspired me to make a loose map of the dominant highway in our area, Route 210. I believe 210 was built during WWII because bombs were being made at the Naval Ordnance Station at Indian Head and they needed a speedy way to deliver the bombs. The road was built straight for maximum efficiency without regard for what was already there – that’s why Livingston Road crosses 210 so many times. The family farm was also bisected during the construction because ‘have bombs must travel’. Today, people can only dream of efficient travel on Route 210. There is a popular facebook group for local commuters called ‘Nightmare on 210’ where people recant their commuting woes. The themes depicted on my map all come from this group of clever people who, apparently realizing you can either laugh or cry about a dystopian situation, have decided to laugh. And vent! And if you don’t drive nicely, they will take your picture and post it!

Human Adding Machine

I got a request to make my “game” of Human Adding Machine described in a previous post more fun-sounding. I have done that below (if you define “more fun” as “more complicated”). As foreshadowed in that post, my version 2 game does involve bottles of beer, but it still does not require partial nudity or body painting (unlike Human Chess).

Caveats. To play this game, someone in the group needs to understand base-7 arithmetic (here is some info on it). It isn’t necessary for the players of the game to understand base-7 arithmetic, or even know that the game is performing arithmetic.

To read the blog post you are reading now, however, and have it sound like fun (my original task), the reader has to have at least an interest in other-base arithmetic, or an equivalent amount of math-geekiness in other areas. You’ve been warned.

Note in press. Shortly after publishing this, my learned friend Pete Boundy correctly pointed out that the H.A.M. game would be 16⅔% more fun if it used base‑7 arithmetic instead of base‑6 as originally written. So this post is a base‑7 revision of what I originally posted.

Players.

One player is called the User. He or she sets into motion the transfer of beer between players.

The other players, called Players, make up the components of the adding machine. The game can have any number of Players, although the more Players you have, the more beer you need.

One person (who can be the User, or one of the Players, or someone else) is the Judge. The Judge’s job is to decide on the addition problem to be solved, and adjudicate at the end whether it was solved correctly. The Judge needs to be able to understand base-7 arithmetic.

Initial setup.

The Judge determines a base-7 addition problem to solve,
for example, 1524(7) + 653(7) = ?

The Players line up, and the Player at the far right of the line is called “Player 1”. Each Player receives a six-pack of beer from the User. The six-pack can have any number of beer bottles in it from zero to six, determined by the User.

Rules of Game play: Players.
1. Each Player can only receive more beer from the User, or from the Player on his or her immediate right.
2. Each Player can only give beer to the person on his or her immediate left.
3. Each Player can receive only one new beer at a time. When a beer is received, it is put in the Player’s six-pack.
4. A Player can receive a beer at any time, but a Player can only give away a bottle if rule 5 applies.
5. If at any time a Player receives a beer and can’t put it in his or her six-pack because it’s already full, all of his or her beer is forfeit. He or she must immediately (a) give the bottle of beer just received to the Player on the immediate left, and (b) take all the bottles of beer out of the six-pack and recycle them, and be left with an empty six pack.

Rules of Game play: User.
1. The User is given the two numbers making up the addition problem, 1524 and 653 in our example.

2. The User sets the initial conditions by giving out six-packs to the Players based on the first number, say 1524. “Player 1” gets a six-pack with 4 bottles in it to correspond to the right-most digit, 4. The next Player over gets a six-pack with 2 bottles, the next a six-pack with 5 bottles, and the next a six-pack with 1 bottle. Any further Players get empty six-packs with zero bottles. (If you have many Players getting zero beer bottles, and you have enough beer, you should pick a bigger starting number to maximize the fun–having no beer isn’t that much fun)

3. Once the initial conditions are set, game play begins. The User starts handing out beer to Players, one beer at a time, based on the second number of his or her addition problem. If the number is 653, the User gives 3 bottles of beer to “Player 1”. The User gives the next Player 5 bottles of beer, because 5 is the next digit. The next Player gets 6 bottles, and the Players beyond that get no bottles in this example.
Note 1. If a Player needs to give away beer, you should give him or her a chance to do that before giving him or her any more beer.
Note 2. there is no required order for the User to give out the beer, as long as he or she gets the totals right. One could give one beer to the first Player, two to the second, then go back and give another to the first before giving some to the third, etc.

4. When the User has handed out all the beer corresponding to the second addition term, his or her role in passing out beer is complete (unless you’re playing Extreme Human Adding Machine, in which more than two numbers are summed!)

5. After all the Players have done all the allowed moves that they can, the game is over. The User then counts the number of beer bottles in each six-pack and converts it to a number: the count of bottles in “Player 1″s six-pack is the right-most (units) digit of that number, the next Player’s bottle count is the next-left digit, and so on.

How to win.

VARIATION 1: The User generates a number from the final distribution of beer bottles as above. The Judge determines if this number is the correct answer to the addition problem.

In the example used above, 1524(7) + 653(7) = 2510(7).

If the addition was performed correctly, everyone wins! and all drink beer. If the answer is incorrect, everyone loses, and all drink beer (but unhappily).

VARIATION 2: In this case, all of the rules of the game are the same, but the object of the game is to maximize your own personal beer supply. So the Player with the most beer in his or her six-pack when the game ends wins, and gets to drink more beer than the losers.

Note that in variation 2, winning the game has nothing to do with whether the addition problem was solved correctly. But because the Players really have no choices to make during the entire game, the problem should be solved correctly anyway. Unless a Player cheats! (Which is exactly what has happened when a computer program you wrote does not run as it should.)

In both variations, the Players don’t need to know or care that they are solving a math problem for the addition to work, just like the little nanogates or quantum wells or whatever they make computers out of these days don’t know they are doing math for you when you run your computer.

Thanks, and sorry!

-Dorn
6/30/19