Dunning-Kruger Is Wrong, Black Metal in Five Albums, Self-Centered Estranged Parents, and Free Classes for the Masses - Dinner Table Digest № 51
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
And we’re back on track with our regularly scheduled content! Today we update the now-ubiquitous Dunning-Kruger Effect, foreground a few seminal black metal albums, point out the selfishness of so many estranged parents, and highlight The Catherine Project, a project that brings free classes to the masses.
Sections:
Dunning-Kruger is Wrong / Black Metal in Five Albums / Another Self-Centered Estranged Parent / The Catherine Project
Debunking the Dunning-Kruger Effect - Eric C. Gaze - The Conversation
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is by now an established fact of pop psychology, claims that while humans regularly overestimate how smart they actually, the least intelligent among us overestimate their capabilities much more than those who are statistically more intelligent. This claim has been used to explain the actions of individuals ranging across politics, economics, and social society, often as a way of denigrating the capabilities of those who might make different decisions with their lives than the statistically average person. And yet, according to Eric C. Gaze, a senior lecturer of mathematics at Bowdoin College, the entire theory may be false. What I found particularly fascinating was that Gaze and colleagues were able to duplicate the Dunning-Kruger Effect using randomly generated data:
First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers.
Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores. Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved.
To conclude the piece, Gaze writes,
The Dunning and Kruger experiment did find a real effect – most people think they are better than average. But according to my team’s work, that is all Dunning and Kruger showed.
A beginner's guide to black metal in five essential albums - Matt Mills - Metal Hammer
I don’t normally feature listicles, but every once in a while there’s a good one out there worth highlighting. In this case, it’s a basic introduction to music’s most sinister genre, infamously known for its fascist ideologies, church burnings, and murder. While those days are behind us (though fascism persists in the genre known as National Socialist Black Metal), some of those early recordings, particularly those by Mayhem, are important to the development of the musical genre. I’ll link to the first song on the list, also known as the first song to contain the words Black Metal together.
My Daughter Won't Call Me on Mother's Day - Bliss Goldstein - Insider
This commentary was originally a tweet thread.
I can tell you exactly why this mother has not heard from her daughter in five years. In all of the words spilled here, few are about her daughter, and those there are revolve entirely around how wonderful a mother she was to her daughter. All of them are about her and how slighted, hurt, and depressed she is at the fact that her daughter has not contacted her. At the beginning of the article she says that thing that all self-centred estranged parents say: ‘They won't talk to me, and I don't know why,’ before going on to talk about how she now has "mourning sickness" and needs the support of other "rejected moms." At no point in the article did the author make any effort to empathize with her daughter. She didn't bring up her child's feelings once throughout the entire article, only hers. There's no sign of self-awareness or self-reflection about how she might have contributed to the situation, not a single word that acknowledges that she might have made some mistakes as a parent. She says she doesn't know why her child won't talk to her, while showing absolutely no interest in her daughter as a person. Even when Goldstein talks about playing with her daughter when she was a baby, the focus was all on her:
I think about those other [estranged] mothers. We were there for each other when our children were little. When my daughter was 9 months old, I took her to music class. It was really a mom's group. We exchanged exhausted smiles while sitting in a circle and singing songs. I clapped my daughter's hands in time to "Old MacDonald." She giggled when I mooed. (emphasis added)
The entire article is intended to manufacture outrage at a younger generation that 'doesn't know it's place,' perpetuating the false idea that respect - and relationship - is simply owed to parents by their adult children by virtue of the fact that they are their biological progenitors. Every time you read one of these sob stories by supposedly abandoned parents look to see how much time the writer spends doing any kind of self-reflection on how they may have contributed to the estrangement. If the piece centers the parent and either ignores or blames the child, you have a pretty good indication of why the relationship went sideways.
The Catherine Project
As most of my readers know, I have been sitting in on classes at the University of Waterloo for a few years now, thanks to the kindness and generosity of a number of professors in the philosophy department.1 As a firm believer in life-long learning, I really wish that others had these kinds of opportunities - not everyone has the opportunity or the resources to be able to attend university while young, or even as a mature adult. The Catherine Project looks to bring some of the great pieces of literature and philosophy from around the world to the masses by offering Zoom classes to interested folks free of charge. A selection of their Summer 2023 Offerings include:
Aquinas, Selections from his political writings
Aristotle, Writings on logic and dialectic: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations
Augustine, On the Trinity
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Alice Through the Looking Glass
Confucius, Analects & Sophocles, the Theban plays
Dante, The New Life
John Dewey, Art as Experience
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil & Brother Jacob
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Old English poetry: Beowulf, The Seafarer, and The Wanderer
The epic of Mwindo
The epic of Sunjata
The Catherine Project also offers classes in some of the Classic languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin and Syriac.
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As a reminder, I graduated with my B.A (2005) and my M.A. (2008) in philosophy from the University of Waterloo. If you want to read my Master’s thesis, which was on health care as a human right, you can do so here.