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Intelligent people are more likely to underestimate themselves, while ignorant people are more likely to believe they’re brilliant.

Dunning-Kruger

Known as the Dunning Kruger Effect, some unskilled people believe they are superior and assess their own abilities as much higher than what is accurate. On the other side of the coin, some highly skilled people often underestimate their competence, assuming that what is easy for them, is also easy for others. 

The "NEWS" has only two sources

1. press releases from the government and businesses and non-profit agencies and celebrities and academics who are announcing to the world what they are (or claim to be) doing

2. journalists’ own “investigations”

There are no incentives for either group to minimize the “visibility” of poverty, any more than there were any incentives for missionary groups to tell the congregations back home that “actually the heathen seem quite content to remain unconverted”.

The government gets its money because of “problems”. Businesses want always to seem “charitable”. Non-profit agencies are in the business of “charity” and “problems”; and, as Jason Reitman’s wonderful script puts it, every celebrity needs a “cause”. No explanation is needed for the academics.

Niederhoffer on making errors

 

As a squash player, I was gifted. I had all the right things going for me. I practiced. I was very good with the racket, and I had tremendous anticipation. But I tended to play an errorless game by hitting a slice on my backhand, which took a lot of power off the ball. That wasn’t a disaster, but it was definitely a weakness in my game. My opponents always used to say that on a good day they could beat me, because they could hit more spectacular shots than me. But they never did. I went for about 10 years without losing a game, except to [the great Pakistani squash player] Sharif Kahn. He made about six, seven errors a game—but he also made eight or nine winners. I would make about zero errors per game but only one or two winners. He had the edge on me about 10-4, and I regret that I was never willing to accept the risky shots and confrontations, never willing to play a more error-full game.

In my market career, I took too many risks. In my squash career, I didn’t take enough.

I wish I had applied my squash methods to my speculating. I’d be a very wealthy man if I had.

 

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