This obviously gets in the way when having conversations about anything at all, and I [...]]]> Here’s the biggest problem. People don’t like to be told they’re incorrect (I sure as hell don’t – I instantly start evaluating just how big the set of people it is I will have to notify of my wrongness, among other things).

This obviously gets in the way when having conversations about anything at all, and I think gets worse the more important that incorrect things it the person who holds the incorrect knowledge. Things like… I don’t know… racism?

Anyway, a John Scalzi post and followup comments from the past few days are relevant and, I think, interesting, and I’ll try to get what I can from them as I move through life.

The Scalzi post.

The first comment is about the Dunning-Kruger effect (by which we know that people with little knowledge and/or skill think they know more than they do and people with greater knowledge and/or skill think they know less than they do), which is and Ig Nobel award work originally published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999.

And the comments have other gems.