{"id":4484,"date":"2013-10-09T19:58:12","date_gmt":"2013-10-10T00:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4484"},"modified":"2013-10-09T20:47:19","modified_gmt":"2013-10-10T01:47:19","slug":"im-already-plenty-good-at-logic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4484","title":{"rendered":"I’m already plenty good at logic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles S. Peirce opens the “Fixation of Belief”<\/a> with the observation:<\/p>\n

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of the NS readers are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 In short, it’s that the less you know, the less likely you’ll recognize that you don’t know.\u00c2\u00a0 Poor performers regularly overestimate their abilities.\u00c2\u00a0 This is borne out in Dunning and Kruger’s case in grammar tests, logic tests, humor-recognition tests and in a variety of other areas (e.g., tests taken by medical students, engineers, and so on).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The trouble is that self-monitoring can’t give reliable feedback when you don’t have the proper criteria for evaluation.<\/p>\n

So the question is: how do people perform when, after having done badly and evaluated themselves well, we give them clear criteria for evaluation?\u00c2\u00a0 How do they do, and how do they rate their performances? For sure, without this intervention, the D-K Effect becomes the D-K Cycle.\u00c2\u00a0 But can intervention as education work?<\/p>\n

So after having bombed the last logic test, the subjects are brought back in and given a mini-lecture on how to solve the logic problems they were tested on last time.\u00c2\u00a0 They, then, had the criteria for discriminating good from bad performances. The result?\u00c2\u00a0 They judged their prior performances quite harshly and came to see that they had a long way to go before they were good at the tasks.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s pretty great news to logic teachers.<\/p>\n

Ah, but an interesting wrinkle<\/a> about the need for this intervention.\u00c2\u00a0 Dunning and Kreuger gave the same test to two different groups, but told one group it was a logic test and the other group that it was a computer-test.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the big difference:\u00c2\u00a0 people who took the logic test systematically more confident (and thereby overrated themselves in poor performances) than those who took the computer test.\u00c2\u00a0 Same test, but different name.\u00c2\u00a0 Why is this?\u00c2\u00a0 The thought is that it’s because we all think we’re already pretty good at reasoning.\u00c2\u00a0 We do it every day, so we must have some skills.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s right there that logic teachers cringe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles S. Peirce opens the “Fixation of Belief” with the observation: Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. Many of the NS readers are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect.\u00c2\u00a0 In short, it’s that the less you know, the less likely you’ll recognize … Continue reading I’m already plenty good at logic<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4484"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4486,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4484\/revisions\/4486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}