Friday 31 October 2014

A word portrait of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Cabinet ministers


The ideology-based wrecking ball that is the Abbott Government can possibly be explained thus…………………..

Kruger  and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize -- scratch that, cannot recognize -- just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.  Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight:  for poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack.  To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent.  Poor performers -- and we are all poor performers at some things -- fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack. 
What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious.  Instead the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge….. [Rabett Run, 24 October 2014]

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment. [Dunning, David et al, June 2003]

The electorate's response to the Abbott Government post-September 2013 may be explained by this......

Fremdscham (the noun) describes the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. Fremdscham occurs when someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves simply is not, and you start feeling embarrassment in their place. It is at the heart of beloved "mockumentaries" such as The Office, Modern Family, or Ricky Gervais' Extras. It is also what makes the auditions for American Idol, Britain's got Talent and Deutschland Sucht den Superstar so discomfortingly entertaining…
Besides the emotional response, Fremdscham-inducing events and items (such as this creationist video) also usually cause one to ask this question: "how on earth can these people be unaware of how stupid they are being right now?". [Daniel R. Hawes, 6 June 2010]

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