About a year or so ago I came across a link to this paper (warning: PDF file) in the comments to a blog.  I found it very interesting, and since reading it I’ve been able to recognize this phenomenon “in the wild” so often that I figured I should share.  I’ll warn you that the paper is a 14-page academic paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... and it reads like one.  After the first page or so it gets pretty tedious to read.

Even so, here’s the gist of it:  Often times, someone who is unskilled at something is unaware that they are unskilled, because they don’t have enough skill to evaluate their own skill.  If you ask students how they think they did on a math test after taking it, for example, the students who performed poorly will grossly overestimate their performance.  They usually have some idea that they didn’t perform well, but they aren’t good enough at math to realize just how badly they did.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a surprising number of times.  Like someone a few years ago that claimed to have a “heavy graphics background”, then showed me something he made in Flash that was a bumpy model of 3D text, with a glaring shading error on one edge.  I remember someone I went to high school with, who would typically say “I didn’t miss any questions on that test” after taking a test, which would have me worried because I thought I might have missed one or two.  Then we’d get the test back and he’d get a seventy-something.  But he never quite caught on that maybe he was judging his own performance poorly.

Long before reading about this behavior, I learned to distrust confident people.  Upon reading this paper, I realized why most advice you receive is bad:  most people who feel entitled to give advice are not at all qualified to do so.  The great irony is that for most people confidence is a desirable quality in a leader, misinterpreted as an indicator of competence.  You needn’t look far into the world of politics to find dozens of examples of this principle at work.

So to conclude, I ask that my readers (all ten of you) watch for examples of this in your life.  It happens way more often than you might expect.

maybe if we’re loud we’ll stay alive

The top ten best-selling video games of 2006 (as reported by NextGen):

10. Need For Speed Carbon
9. Fight Night Round 3
8. Call Of Duty 3
7. Kingdom Hearts II
6. Gears Of War
5. New Super Mario Bros.
4. NCAA Football 07
3. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
2. Cars
1. Madden NFL 07

Cars was the 2nd best selling game in North America of 2006.  Seriously.  I was surprised too.  But Madden is no surprise, selling two-and-a-half times more copies than Cars.  I don’t understand the drive to play the same game over and over again every year.  I know someone who didn’t get a new system last time around until they stopped making Madden on the N64, at which point he bought a GameCube (as it was the cheapest).  He will probably buy his next system when they stop making Madden for the Cube.  That makes no sense to me.  I’m also kind of surprised to see Gears Of War in the top ten, not that I’m implying it is a bad game, I just didn’t realize there were enough 360’s for it to be a top-ten game.  The full article is interesting but kind of long (16 pages long), so if you’re bored you should check it out.

On a side note, why do online news article insist on using “pages” anyway?  Nine out of ten dentists agree that webpages can now scroll vertically without negatively affecting their usability.

Does it make me a terrible person if I feel almost no sympathy for this guy, who was sent to prison for getting three DUI’s, getting raped in prison? (SFW, unless the words “rape” or “sodomy” get flagged by a filter or something.  In which case, I guess this page is NSFW).  I know it’s not how I should feel, as a Christian or as a civilized person or as a nice guy or for whatever reason.  But I mean, really, three DUI’s?  That should carry at least the same prison sentence as attempted murder, since that’s pretty much what it is.  Anyone who’s been to middle school has heard what goes on in prisons.  If this guy were imprisoned for something basically victimless, I would feel bad.  If he were falsely convicted of something, I would feel bad.  And sure, I don’t think it’s good that this happens in prisons.  But as for feeling sorry for this guy?  He is where he is as a result of his own actions and choices, and if he did not have an idea of what he was in for that is more than just ignorance.  The Human Rights Watch should have used someone else’s letter to make me feel sympathy.  In fact, the only part of that whole article that really made me feel sympathetic was the statement that he probably has AIDS now.

Go directly to jail.  Do not pass Go.  Do not collect $200.

Apparently my writing style is analogous to my baseball-throwing style.  According to The Gender Genie, most of my blog posts appear to have been written by a female.  It’s all based on some algorithm derived from some research paper by some grad students at Illinois Institute of Technology and at some school in Israel.

Whatevs.

Well the calendar companies have again tricked us all into shelling out even more money for astrological tables which focus on the earth’s location relative to the sun.  So according to an ancient tradition which dates back nearly a year, I will review some of the adventures I have been through with you, faithful reader of my boring blog.

Let’s see...  there was that time I got ripped off on eBay, although technically that happened in 2005.  But I didn’t blog about it until 2006 so it still counts.  Then I critiqued some xenophobic e-mail, shortly before I influenced the direction of American television.  I listed a few of my favorite things, for all to see and marvel at.  Later Stephanie interviewed for and was subsequently offered a job.  But in between those two events, we ate a year-old pastry.  Once we had another source of income we bought a new car.  A few months later I bought a new amp and rocked super hard.  I built the most complex sand castle I’ve ever built, but sadly it could not stand up to the incoming tide.  As the summer was winding down, I let you all in on twenty-six video games that I think are totally cool, before letting you in on a little secret: this is where I work.  Next, I became an uncle at the same time that Stephanie became an aunt, when our new niece began to independently consume some of the extra oxygen in the atmosphere.  Stephanie made a list, focusing on movies, and then I jumped on board the MySpace bandwagon thing.  Just when I was starting to feel like a cool young dude, I got a year older.  But at least I won a hot blonde girl bean bag chair to ease my aging back.  To finish up the year I finished a project that was two years in the making, before being robbed by some stupid teenagers.

Nothing changes on New Year’s Day
—Bono (greatest rock star, humanitarian, philanthropist, and savior ever to call himself all of those things)

So I mentioned quite a while back that I had been reading The Daily WTF.  Well a little over a year ago I sent something in.  Not bad code, but a funny story about an interview experience I had.  Last Friday (on my birthday, ironically), Alex (who runs the site) decided to run my story along with four other interview stories.  He also decided to take a poll of which story was the best, and the submitter of the winning story would win a bean bag chair from Sumo Lounge.  Well my story won (seen here, the one titled “Are You An Astronaut?”).  Be forewarned:  the version of the story shown on the site has been edited a little bit from what I sent in (which will be faithfully reproduced at the end of this post).  I kinda feel bad that I stopped reading the site a few months ago because I got bored with it.. but I got an e-mail this week saying that I won an Omni bean bag chair, I just needed to pick a color (I went with Charcoal Green).  These things are supposed to be pretty nice (and at $150, they’d better be!); I’ll be sure to let you, o faithful reader of my blog, know what I think of it.  Hopefully the blonde comes with it.

As promised, here is the original version of the story that I sent in:

Fresh out of college, I was interviewing for a junior programming job at a company that develops software for aerospace/automotive companies.  So far the day was going well.  I interviewed for about an hour with someone from HR, then interviewed for another hour with the person who might be my manager, and that interview went really well.  Then to close the day I interviewed with the project manager (the previous manager’s manager).  Again, things were going well.  There was a lull in the interview where the guy was looking up something on his computer, so I started looking at the things he had up around his office.  On one wall he had a collage of NASA stuff.  Without thinking, I guess to make conversation or something, I asked him if he was an astronaut!  It was one of those situations where I was regretting it even as it was coming out of my mouth.  He looked at me like I was retarded, then said “no, I was a project manager at NASA.”

As it turns out, I was somehow still offered that job, and it’s where I’m working now (a little over a year later).  I don’t know if the guy remembers me asking that or not, but he’s my manager’s manager so I don’t really see him that often.

I recently discovered that there is a classification of political ideologies that is kinda like what I believe:  South Park Republican.  Okay so the term was coined five years ago, but I had never heard it until about a month ago.  So I thought I’d share.

Remember the internet before CSS?  Set the dial to 1996 and crank up the flux capacitor for the worst web design advice ever.  Here’s a sample: “If you want people to read [your web pages], don’t [use standard HTML constructs]. They take away your typographic control. Specify your own font sizes when you want a size change.”  To a nongeek, let me just say that reading this statement is tantamount to reading “When running with scissors, make sure they are always pointed up.  Otherwise, if you fall, you might stab yourself in the thigh.”

The other day while walking through the parking lot at work, I noticed something that kind of annoyed me.  Take a look at this picture and see if you notice anything odd:

It’s called the “Cobalt” but it is red!  Didn’t someone at Chevrolet know that Cobalt is a shade of blue, not unlike the stone of the same name?  Seeing “Cobalt” on a bright red car is just extremely distasteful to me.

However, this gives me a great idea.  Check out these t-shirts I put up on CafePress.  They rock hard.

I bring forth two topics of discussion on this grim mid-January day.  First, I built a new PC last week.  Here is a picture of that process that Stephanie captured.  Notice as Punky eagerly awaits the opportunity to chew on any part I do not need.  This was my first time building a whole PC, which wasn’t very difficult.  I thought I had destroyed my processor though.  All you ever hear is how incredibly sensitive the processor is, but once you get the clasp closed down on it, it is pretty much indestructible.  I learned this while trying to mount the cooling fan on the processor.. which involved applying a sizeable percentage of my full body weight to the “snap-in” mounting screws.  But other than that, and the fact that I forgot to put in the shield around the connectors on the back and had to unmount the motherboard to put it in, everything went pretty well.

Second, I am going to discuss Windows Live Local (found, cryptically enough, at local.live.com).  It’s Microsoft’s latest way to compete with Google (specifically, Google Maps).  So far, it’s got the immediate advantage of making much prettier maps.  It also has satellite data of course.  The photos around Charlotte are older than Google’s, but they also have some black and white photos that cover my hometown in a pretty high resolution (albeit without color), where Google just says “no satellite imagery available at this zoom level.”  I guess I should try to get to a point here.  I don’t normally like to side with the “I hate Microsoft because they’re successful” techno-hippies.  If you want to read blogs about that, you don’t have to look very hard.  I’m going to objectively and open-mindedly suggest to you that perhaps Microsoft sucks.  Proof of this theorem is left as an exercise for the reader.

I guess what I’m addressing specifically is Microsoft’s “throw money at the latest tech trend until we have at least ninety percent market share” strategy.  I’m really amazed at the economics of it.. ya know, that it actually works.  I mean, look at what they did to Netscape seven years ago.  And that was competition for lead market share for a piece of software that they give away for free, without any kind of embedded advertising.

The inspiration for this whole blog post is this comment I read in an interview EGM had with Bill Gates (well, the interview was actually with Peter Moore, the Bill Gates thing was a sidebar):

EGM: Microsoft has lost roughly $1 billion a year on the first Xbox since it launched. Was that worth it?

Bill Gates: We knew going into the original Xbox that we would lose...a lot. Or you can say, invest a lot—that’s the nice way to say that. And we knew the only thing we’d get out of that first generation was the learning and credibility that came with that experience.

Read the whole article here.

Can you imagine if you were owner of a company and you told your shareholders “Our strategy this year is to release a product that loses a billion dollars a year, for the next five years.  Then maybe we’ll start to turn a profit.”  I mean, even if you’re Microsoft, a billion dollars is still a pretty significant sum of money.

So give me all your poison