This had a thread running on the Blue for the first part but then it tapered off before Morris got into the really good stuff. Reading this got me digging into his other stuff at the Times. Now I see a fifth part has just gone up.

Morris is deeply interested in how we know things are true, subjective/objective truth and other equally confusing topics.

I spent a lot of time today on this older series of posts about a pair of photos from the Crimean War.

≡ Click to see image ≡

If you ever get in an argument, never use the line "You are too stupid to realize how stupid you are."

Trust me on this one.

I don't understand this, so it can't possibly be true.

I haven't read the original link yet but I have read warbaby's Crimean War link and I am a bit bewildered. It seems many folks think the ON photo has more impact than the OFF photo. I don't get it. Photographically I find the OFF photo far more powerful than the ON photo. The cannon balls on the road draw the eye and distract for a long period and thus kill the impact. The OFF photo leads us from the lower right up to the horizon. What is up there? What are we facing? OFF has far more impact.

"never use the line 'You are too stupid to realize how stupid you are.'" Nonsense! This leads to a spirited dialectic!

People who think you should never use the line are too stupid, oh, never mind.

This article is pretty interesting, and provides some theoretical substance to something I'm sure we've all noticed in our lifetimes. I struggled a bit with the format, because I have a bias against Q&As as opposed to narrative journalism and because it begins in sort of a wandering, "News of the Weird" way, so maybe I should look for some other pieces like warbaby did. Thanks for posting.

One example comes to mind: people turning in supposedly finished work that hasn't been proofread and is full of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. When you can't attribute this to laziness, you can only attribute it to the Dunning-Kruger effect; they haven't proofread because they are confident that they've got a good command of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and so they don't believe there are any errors.

Doesn't this apply to all of us to some degree?

I think so, but it's true that you can cultivate the habit of checking yourself before assuming you know all about something. I have been working on that all my life. Two things have helped greatly: one, working in museums, where the devotion to accuracy of information and using good references has schooled me in being a thousand times more comfortable saying things like "I have never looked into that aspect of this," or "I'm not completely sure when this particular innovation came about" or flat out "I don't know [but here is how you/we could find out]." The second is participating on MetaFilter. There have certainly been a few times when I sallied forth confidently describing something I think I know, only to be schooled by a more experienced or expert person that there was a lot more I was unaware of. Again, it has helped me confine my remarks to what I'm sure of, and ask questions about what I'm not as sure of.

Invariably, there are still always things we don't know, and things we don't know we don't know. The trick that these articles seem to proscribe is to remember that there are things you don't know, and to use every opportunity to ask yourself and others, 'what else is there to know about this? Is there something I'm missing?"

I like that way of putting it. It also puts it in the positive light of "learnable skill" rather than the sense of finality that feels like comes with "too stupid to see stupidity."

Really interesting links, folks, thanks for sharing them.

Also: I may be ignorant, but I ain't stupid. ;-)

One example comes to mind: people turning in supposedly finished work that hasn't been proofread and is full of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. When you can't attribute this to laziness, you can only attribute it to the Dunning-Kruger effect; they haven't proofread because they are confident that they've got a good command of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and so they don't believe there are any errors.
I read a lot of a reports written by articulate, intelligent people who take pride in their work. In a busy day, sometimes 100+pages. Most of these reports have been proof-read (to varying degrees, sure) by the author, then by a team leader, then by someone else before they come to me (at various stages in their development). Many still have simple errors in them that every one of those people have missed.

Having done this for some time now, I've come to the following conclusions:
1. It's absolutely impossible to proof-read your own work.
2. There's always one more error. Finding that 'one last' error always leads to inadvertently introducing another error.
3. You will immediately notice errors the moment the person the report is intended for starts to read it.

I think you've just articulated DG's Law.