Crybaby Clay and the puzzle of self-reinforcing incompetence

A few weeks ago, I noted that Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson has persisted in his habit of protecting himself and his like-minded contributors and commenters from pesky questions about factual support for their claims. One of those commenters, hereinafter referred to as Crybaby Clay, has taken issue with my characerization of his claims as being unsupported by fact. In the process, he proves that he not only does not have any facts to support his claims, but he also does not even understand why factual support for his claims is necessary.

To those of us capable of making rational, evidence-based arguments, this is puzzling. Why would anyone trying to make a convincing argument deliberately fail to provide facts to back up the claims he makes? One possible answer is that such people are simply incompetent at the task of constructing an argument. Why, then, don’t these people learn from their mistakes and improve their cognitive skills? According to a study published a few years ago, it is possible that folks like Crybaby Clay are not only too incompetent to construct a rational argument, but their incompetence also prevents them from recognizing their own deficits:

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

“I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn’t know it,’’ Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,’’ wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,’’ the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate’’ how well they had performed.

In all three tests, subjects’ ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.

...Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “he who knows best knows how little he knows.’‘

So Crybaby Clay and his fellow incompetents can take heart. They can become competent at reasoning and argument — but they’ll have to seek out help to do so.

What are the chances of that?

UPDATE 10/06 09:35 AM: I just happened to stumble across a relevant entry on the Bad Analysis blog entitled 10 reasons people make stupid decisions. Read the comments; there may in fact be far more than ten reasons for entrenched incompetence.