M*****
A ridiculously slow day, broken up with news that M***** had died. Perhaps 57, a waiter there on and off, career waiter throughout the city so a few people were affected. The owner, he pretends, doesn't really care, seems a bit callous, but that's him, his own kids could die and he wouldn't give a damn...
M*****, to sum him up, career alcoholic waiter, perpetually drunk, short, balding, didn't look a day over 70 (and so to discover his real age was a surprise...), dead on vacation to Europe visiting relatives. And so the nephew regales us the entire day with tales of his drunkenness, his propping himself against the chair while he took the order, so as not to fall over, a notepad for a table of 2, and the letters of complaint that often followed his service...me, I'd happily frequent a restaurant where the waiters felt free to be drunk ass-over-keister at 12:00 noon, but others of our customers weren't so forgiving...
...and the hiring of him, he'd worked here before me, been fired for being a drunk, this time, he came for lunch with his wife, younger, the sad pretty of someone who's made a bad marriage, lived her life in regret, the owner speaks to him, receives assurances of his sobriety, M***** is quick to give them, "been months since I've touched a drop..." even if this were true this wouldn't be the job to keep that promise, but if the owner had looked closer the martini and the half liter of wine on the table might have given him away...
M*****, dead, we'd often wondered and shared his many adventures aloud, the other waiter, A***** never knew him, but knows him well enough through the legends, RIP.
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Technology & Prizes
And there's the "Drone Prix" in Dubai, I had no idea there was such a thing. Probably there wasn't, but now there is, and that's the new way of the world and if you didn't know you're an idiot...
I say that in Irony. If you knew I'd tell you you need a life...and that, sincerely...
And Drones, they're cool and all, and drone racing, well, I appreciate it, but imagine...
What if we gave out prizes for self-driving car competitions, and AI competitions, evolving AI, or genetic engineering, green energy, or other cutting edge technologies, where would we be? These are the things that deserve our attention...
Not drones, superficially cool, but autonomous drones that can interact with their surroundings, with convincing AI - Human interfaces, so many deserving endeavors and the basest of them get their own grande-prix...bloody hell...
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- Category: Ideas & Questions
Ultracrepidarianism & Hanlon's Razor
Because I'm pretty sure you didn't read through the last article to the "See Also", I've abbreviated a couple of my findings here:
"Ultracrepidarianism is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge."
And this...
"Hanlon's razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways including "never assume bad intentions when assuming stupidity is enough", "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice", and "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity""
You're welcome.
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The Dunning–Kruger effect
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" - Charles Darwin
Yep, we all know that person, in my case that crowd...I need to go back and add that tag to a hundred articles...
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.
Hmmm. I'd completely forgotten about this. The problem is that we all have our blindspots, and I sure as hell have mine...but, as the effect notes, I'm probably not able to see it...
Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.
But my favorite has to be:
...The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras....
Read more at the Wiki, and the next time you're speaking with that co-worker you might want to work in the term...
Note: In the event that you've seen me work a magic trick or a hot woman at a bar, I'm aware, I'm aware...It's only 9 parts incompetence, the other 1 part is entirely Irony...
Read through to the "See Also". Oh, yeah...
Link: The Dunning-Kruger Effect on Wikipedia
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