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Comment Re: Occam's Razor (Score 4, Informative) 1024

Oh, maybe... because of the 2008 recession, which was caused by the financial crisis meltdown? The crisis which became widely public in late summer/early fall of 2008, while he was still in the process of actually getting elected? He didn't actually take office until 2009... This has been a standard part of the republican playbook since the 80's... Either run up massive debt and ignore fiscal responsibilities just before leaving office, so that when democrats are elected, it "appears" as if it was all their fault, and then they have to spend time recovering...

Comment No public cloud or web-based sites and services? (Score 1) 122

So - they don't plan on using public cloud and combining with perhaps more than one vendor and/or using publically hosted websites? (i.e. Github, etc.) If they stick with one or two vendors, then private connections are possible, but this seems to be quite a step backwards in todays network-neutral, cloud, SaaS & managed web services connected world...
Science

We Are All Confident Idiots 306

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-party dept.
An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell. He's written an article on the "psychology of human wrongness," explaining how confidence in one's answers tends to be high for people who don't know what they're talking about. He says, "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."

Dunning goes on: "A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don't know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it's grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver's license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot."

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