Incompetence and All Children Above Average

Garrison Keillor says in Lake Woebegone all children are above average. Two professors publish an article suggesting that incompetent people overestimate their abilities. To quote the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

There's problems with this. Teenagers are incompetent drivers, but think they're invincible. Most drivers of all ages think they're above average drivers, which is mathematically impossible. (I'd suggest the most realistic drivers are those between 50 and 65--after 65 you start to lose it but are in a state of denial :-( )

Praise for Bureaucrats?

Christopher Hayes in the Nation
praises bureaucrats (Hat tip I think to Kevin drum.) for standing up to the Bush administration on various fronts. While I'm all for bureaucrats, and all for standing up to the Bush administration, I suspect liberals should be moderate in their praise and expectations.

Comes the great day when the Democrats control the Presidency again (plus about 2-6 years) and the papers, or whatever media we have in that grand and glorious time, will be full of stories on bureaucrats standing up to the hare-brained dictats of know-nothing Dems. You can count on it.

IT Progress at the FBI (Rah)

The sound of one hand clapping as the FBI rolls out phase I of its modernization program. It doesn't indicate that it will help in the problem recently reported--the length of time it takes to do FBI checks on immigrants. Apparently it's now a semi-manual process, the FBI office in DC has to poll all its field offices to see if they have anything in their files on a specific applicant. It's not clear from the story where that process is in the program. Perhaps after they upgrade their PC's to Windows XP in 2010?

3 to 5 Hours on the Phone, Daily?

Michelle Slatalla in the NYTimes today reports:

"How many calls does the average college student get or receive, anyway?

Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech who asked more than 600 students that question in 2005, said, “An average of 11 calls a day.”

Professor Meszaros said that women, who talked longer than men, reported speaking most frequently to immediate family members, during calls that lasted 16 to 30 minutes.

“They were on the phone for an average of between three hours and five and a half hours a day?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m guessing that it has ramped up more, too, because this study was done before texting was the fad.”"

I'm stunned, amazed, confused. I don't think I've ever had a day where I spent 5 hours talking with one other person (in series). So much for the idea that modern culture isolates individuals into social atoms.

Happy Birthday, Powerpoint

Via xx, here's an article in the Wall Street Journal on the 20th birthday of Powerpoint, the indispensable tool of bureaucrats these days. While interesting, it fails to give proper credit to the IBMers, led by Thomas J. Watson, who spread the gospel of graphics, along with their motto: "Think" around the world.

As I understand, Watson liked visual aids, so IBM got into it. It spread to DOD, where in the mid '60's I attended "charm school" (training for instructors), which included time on how to make your overhead projections. (Wikipedia has a different chronology, giving credit to the Army in WWII.)

As a bureaucrat, I first steered clear of overheads, until my boss (the one I called the "junior idiot", but not to his face) encouraged them. Part of the problem was the specialization of that era--to get overheads done you went to the graphics/forms shop. I didn't like the dependency. So when WordPerfect came out with a presentations package I got into it, because now I could control the process. ("If you want it done right, do it yourself".)

There was an advantage, especially important for a national bureaucracy faced with training people in 50 states and 2700+ county offices. You could create a graphics presentation and duplicate it for others to present. That's particularly important when the emphasis is on speed--if Congress passes a bill today and wants payments out in X weeks. In the old days, you'd present a spiel and state specialists would desperately (if they were conscientious) try simultaneously to take notes and plan their own presentations to county personnel beginning almost as soon as they got back to the state. It was a formula for misunderstanding, mistakes, and mispaid checks.

Gradually we moved to a pattern where (with the help of very capable county personnel (take a bow MK)) we'd be able to provide copies of the national materials ready for the state specialists. Ironically, we managed to centralize the training materials based on a decentralization of the process of developing them. Powerpoint (and, more importantly, word processing) spread skills and capability to more people, making them more productive. Apparently even school children use it these days. Which is just another instance of formerly advanced skills becoming the common property of the young.

TSP and Social Security Privatization

Back in the day when reform of Social security was under discussion, Republicans were pushing the alternative of having people invest in securities. They preferred the idea of individually managed accounts, as opposed to having the government manage investments. Some Democrats (like me) were open to something like the Thrift Savings Plan--the Federal version of a 401 K for its employees as at least one element of a revised system. Republicans attacked the idea, arguing that a government managed plan would be pressured to reflect social objectives in its investments.

A test of that position is underway--some Dems have asked the TSP to divest of stocks of companies in the Sudan, of tobacco, etc. etc. So far the board has resisted the idea.
If we get a Democratic government in 2008, it will be interesting to see if they can continue to do so.

Pet Peeves--"Traditional Farmers"

Don't have a URL for this, but it's aggravated me and, if this blog serves any purpose at all, it should help relieve my aggravations. Last week I ran across an article criticizing US farm programs (which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that). But one of the criticisms was that they had the effect of undermining the traditional farmers in other countries, because they couldn't compete with the flood of food imported from the U.S. at low subsidized prices.

What aggravates me is not the cause and effect relationship, but the idea that undermining traditional farming is somehow wrong and bad. After all, China is surging its way to developed nation status by policies that undermined traditional farming, creating an urban labor force for its new industries. Ireland is the Tiger of the EU because its traditional farming has been undermined and abandoned. The U.S. is an industrial power because our traditional farming patterns have been destroyed.

Granted, destroy any traditional way of life and you cause suffering and pain, loss of the past and loss of life. And granted, the power of the market is blind. But I believe in the general proposition that life in the U.S. today, taken by and large, is better than it was 180 years ago when one of my ancestors immigrated. And that's true despite, and even because, the traditional agriculture found in 1830 America has been destroyed, even on Amish farms.

Impact of Farm Bill

The Farmgate site of the University of Illinois says extrapolations show minimal impact on agriculture from the administration's farm bill proposals. Oddly, though they credit FAPRI (Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute) for the data, I don't see it highlighted on FAPRI's website.

How the Brits Do Health and IT

This is interesting:

Britain's best-paid civil servant is to quit as the head of NHS information technology, claiming the new, accident-prone computer system is on track.

Richard Granger, the chief executive of Connecting for Health, said he would leave the post, and its £290,000-a-year salary, in October. "There is no doubt about the programme's achievability," said Mr Granger, who took up the role in October 2002. "Most of the building blocks are now in place."

Karen Jennings, the head of health at Unison, the NHS's biggest trade union, said Mr Granger's optimism was at odds with the views of the "majority of NHS staff".

She said: "Technically... things are finally coming together. But lessons must be learned from the way these over-ambitious, big-bang IT projects have been brought in late and so over-budget."

Parts of the project are two years behind schedule and it may now cost a total of £20 billion, which would put it £7 billion over budget.

Mr Granger can point to some successes. An electronic patient-booking service now arranges 20,000 appointments a day and 250 million X-ray images are now stored electronically.

Several things--the guy was the highest paid civil servant. By automating the National Health Service, Britain brings all the advantages and weaknesses of centralized IT to health care, including the problems of doing a big big project. On the other hand, while $40 billion is a bigger project than anything the US government has done, at least outside the military, they appear to have had better success than the FBI has.

Putting Up Fences and Winning the War

The NY times has an op-ed today by Owen and Bing West, Bing was in DOD (under Bush I, I think), Owen was a marine in Iraq. They contrast the ability of NYC cops to identify people and lookup history in databases, with the lack thereof in Iraq. (NYC probably has a large population of illegal immigrants.)

Meanwhile, the people opposing the immigration bill in the senate are calling for tough enforcement. Charles Krauthammer in the Post has an column pushing fences.

I read somewhere that 40 percent of those illegally present in the US arrived on visas, so fences won't be the magic bullet. It seems obvious to me that, if we say that we don't want illegal immigrants, we also are saying we agree to digital ID's, biometric databases, and tight checking of credentials. We can't have one without the other (if indeed we can have the one). As Mr. Heinlein used to say, there's no such thing as a free lunch.