The lowest common denominator

I've been doing a fair amount of reading of late that has been interfering with, but contributing to, my writing.  Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?  I don't know of any connection to Freddie but it is interesting the self-destructive nature of this effect that these scientists have documented.  Perhaps I only find this interesting because of a cognitive psychology course I took many, many moons ago, but I suspect that others will also be interested in light of some of the "conversations" that are occurring around climate change and other natural resource issues today.  One that comes to mind is a spaghetti feed mentioned by Rainbow Jarvis.

Here is a short description from Wikipedia, which begins with a quote from their 1999 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it".^[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."^[1]

“	The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.	”
	— Bertrand Russell[2]

In short, we are screwed.  The lowest common denominator dominates the microphone proclaiming to the world their competency at .....  whatever.  Pick your favorite topic and there is the self-appointed expert.  Not a credential to their name but what they feel they know.  

Now this puts me in a bit of a conundrum because I do like to challenge myself to learn new things and expand my horizons.  I like to believe that on-the-job training is some of the most valuable experience a person can get.  Those efforts, especially when expended on my personal time, don't get a me a degree or even some kind of credential.  And even worse, my reward is an overwhelming sense of how much I don't know.   That I can speak from my own perspective is true.  But I don't have the feeling that I can challenge the experts in the field and say the work they are doing is bunk.  

Does this mean my mind is somehow different from the seething masses of intuitive geniuses?*  I hate to think so.  I hate to think that we are forever condemned to have important societal issues pushed and swayed by the lowest common denominator.  The short Wikipedia article, in summarizing this and followup research, provides a measure of hope.  People, after extensive training or tutoring in the lacking skills, can become better at estimating, and therefore understanding, their own competency.  

So my questions are, what kind of implications does this have for our educational system?  Particularly at the elementary or secondary school level?  How do we give our next generations the leg up to not shoot themselves in the foot as a society by becoming trapped in unending and misnamed "debates" over facts?

*  I will be forever grateful to the author of the term "intuitive genius."  He knows who he is. 

One word ... plastics

Ah, if only what's his name from the graduate were here today to illuminate us with the next big deal...Well maybe not.  My humble opinion is that plastics are definitely something to which the precautionary principle should be applied.  There are definite advantages - I admit I enjoy my GoreTex ski jacket as much as the next person, but I can live without the GoreTex dental floss.  I think that if the European Union can live without BPA, we can too.   And, my other half trained me long ago to carry my own bags to the grocery store to live without both the lightweight single use grocery bags (that made the news recently vis a vis Oregon legislation to ban them) or those nice brown paper bags (which have seen many second lives in my house).

Plastic is everywhere, true.  It makes things cheap in the cost sense of manufacturing and hence, purchase.  But does it also make things cheap in the value sense?  Do I value an item more because I paid less for it?  I don't think I do - in fact, I think often times I value it less if it didn't cost me much.  It becomes a throwaway.

Now, I realize that I'm not talking anything new here, and I feel somewhat as though I am railing against a huge machine that is implacable in its desire to move ahead with profits and more profits at our expense.  And I realize that I am quite hypocritical because I sit here on my enlarging behind typing this on an Apple computer made largely of plastic and drinking coffee out of a travel mug encased in plastic...

How did our society get to this point where we are so completely dependent on oil?  Not just to run our cars and our industry, but for our entertainment (TVs, CDs, DVDs, cameras, naugahyde couches...), our food (plastic lined cans, bottles, keg taps (!)...), our housing (PVC pipes, vinyl siding and windows, Tyvek...), our life (IV drips, catheters (no comment), the baggies that carry blood when you donate (have you donated?).  How amazingly insidious it seems to have these lines of plastic encircling all our lives and we are, mostly, totally unaware of how dependent we have become on what is, mostly, an import to our economy.

When I look at the little list I spat out above, I have to think ask which are the truly necessary?  Obviously beer taps, but for only for reasons of social good.  But really, folks.  Between hybrid vehicle technology*, renewable energy technology**, and conservation techniques***, we have the technological wherewithal to be completely unconcerned about what happens in the middle east, apart from wanting to be the good fairy of democracy.

* leaving aside the latest news of consumer protection falling prey to corporate greed
**has anybody flown over LA or San Francisco lately?  All those huge big box warehouses/industrial buildings with huge flat roofs in the sunshine with huge air conditioning units because the building gains so much heat?
*** do we really  need to use so freaking much plastic, energy and  gas to begin with?

Stormwater solutions from the Daily Score Blog

Interesting stuff from the Daily Score Blog
—

SPECIAL SERIES

STORMWATER SOLUTIONS: CURBING TOXIC RUNOFF

Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter

POSTED BY LISA STIFFLER

01/28/2010 07:30 AM

Curbing stormwater while trimming the bottom line.

Oregon Rain Garden Guide now available

From Oregon Seagrant:

The Oregon Rain Garden Guide was written to help Oregonians learn how to design and build rain gardens to treat the stormwater runoff from their own homes or businesses.  Rain gardens are "gardens with a purpose"; they help reduce the amount of excess water and associated pollutants reaching local lakes, streams and bays.  Ultimately this results in healthier waterways, fish, other wildlife and people.

This how-to guide provide information specific to Oregon's conditions, including the rainfall and appropriate plants for your site.  You don't have to be a stormwater, garden, or landscape professional to use this guide.  It provides the necessary information to safely build and maintain a rain garden, along with references for more detailed guidance for special conditions.

http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/sgpubs/onlinepubs/h10001.pdf

DEQ's failure to regulate - 2

I saw the article over in the Bend Bulletin the other day about a meeting the DEQ* was to hold in Central Oregon on February 4th, 2010.  The headline read:  DEQ to form committee for exploring nitrate issue and solutions.  How classic.  Like so many other actions to improve our society, here is a water protection effort that seems destined to die in committee.  


What I thought was particularly interesting about the article was the timeline that the Bulletin provided for what has happened already in the region.  Nitrates in groundwater are found first in a concentrated area in 1982 and then elsewhere in 1994.  I had to look at that twice and make sure I had my reading glasses on because I was dumbfounded.  That's a total of 28, yes, twenty-eight, years.  The DEQ has documented increasing levels of groundwater contamination in a large (125 square mile area according to the article) area over nearly three decades and they are going to form a committee!?!?


This is an area where one in ten of the wells sampled by the US Geological Survey shows signs of contamination?  Pick your favorite comedian and just imagine what they could do with material like this.  


The sad ending to the article is the series of people saying that it's good to take time to do these things right, that there's no emergency.  No, there is no emergency.  It is obviously too late to save the groundwater, the time for preventing pollution is obviously passed.  I must refer to an earlier post where I talked about delusional people.  This is a region's drinking water supply and yet the environmental protection agency for the state of Oregon is allowing protection actions to be waylaid by rhetoric. 


Three decades is an awfully long time to consider what to do about a groundwater contamination problem.  And to initiate a committee at the end of the three decades to decide what to do next is a pitiful excuse for environmental protection from our state environmental protection agency.  


The thorn is in Oregon DEQ's side for failure to act in accordance with it's own rules.  Duh.


*note the big red blob almost in the middle of the state on the map on this site, this is the region they're talking about in this case.

DEQ's failure to regulate

I noticed a while back that Jackson County is seeking an exception to one of Oregon's statewide land use planning goals in order to extend sewer services to rural properties where there is a demonstrated public health hazard.  Nothing extraordinary in that.  After all, if the public will be harmed by the failure of existing sewage treatment facilities to perform and there is no other way to fix the problem, then by all means, expand society's indebtedness* and put in sewers.  My bigger concern is the reason why this sewer extension is needed at all.  When you read the staff report from Jackson County, there is much discussion of how severely limited the soils are for septic systems and that is why they are failing and that is why they cannot be upgraded.  Here is an excerpt from page 10 of the staff report: 

"Figures 1 through 7 in Exhibit A presented in the background section of this document demonstrate: 1) How most of the soils in the Rogue Valley (Bear Creek Sub-Basin Area) are severely limited with respect to septic treatment and have other soil limitations such as severe shrink-swell characteristics and high water tables; 2) How dense rural and urban land uses, reliant on septic systems for sewage treatment, currently exist in many of these areas..."

The WTF moment in this is that no where in the country and certainly not in Oregon, could anyone have allowed a septic system on these types of soils for at least the last 20 years, if not longer.  These approvals are a clear violation of Oregon rule and provide an extraordinary example of how government can fall down on the job at taxpayer expense.  What motivates a government agency to violate its own rules?  I don't know the specific answer in this specific case but I'm sure we can speculate a little bit in the interest of once again highlighting motivations for action or inaction.

1. Button pushers on the outside:  Pressure that comes from outside of a regulatory agency is a potent motivator for public officials to approve something that ought not be approved in light of what the rules (which are just codified political winds) say.  This might be a motivation coming from elected types wanting to increase revenues to tax coffers or property rights activists threatening lawsuits or the nice older couple that just want to retire to the home they've been dreaming of all their lives.  
2. Rubber stampers on the inside:  Pressure that comes from within the regulatory agency is also a potent motivator and can be a lot more damaging and insidious.  This is pressure that comes from employees who want to look good to those folks higher in the food chain by avoiding controversy or property rights activists that are on staff and that tend to exert their own political will on their job or employees that don't have the huevos to stand up for what's right or worse, that don't care (For example, "One little house isn't going to make a difference."  A hundred houses and twenty years later, what have you got?)

So, in short, having septic systems located in soils that are severely limited for septic systems represents years and years of shoddy decision making that are now going to cost society (in this case residents of Jackson County) a huge amount of money.  WTF?   No wonder public employees have such a bad reputation.  The thorn is definitely in Oregon DEQ's side on this issue and this is not the only case of such short sighted decision making in Oregon.

*  My concern here is that we cannot, as a society, keep up with maintenance and scheduled upgrades to existing facilities, so why continue to add to society's financial burdens to install even more infrastructure that we can't afford to maintain (see the American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card at:  http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/).